Per orthonormal's suggestion I started recording every time I noticed any sort of lack of productivity-conducive activity at work. We'll see how it goes. Yesterday I made 17 notes. Also I looked up how to insert the date/time in Evernote. It's CTRL + ;. Also I did note this instance of interneting already.
I finally took my bike out for a ride.
I'm using ActiveInbox per lukeprog's suggestion. I like it a lot. I'm not sure how far back in my 15,000 emails I want to go before bulk archiving all the remaining emails, but going back over the past month I found about a dozen dangling threads I wanted to follow up on with an email or task.
Yesterday I tried to drive my remaining GMail tasks down to 0. I instead went from 13 to 10. Then up to 13 again.
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of July 9th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Thanks to everyone who contributes!
Academian put up a wiki page with links to the prior May and June threads for reference. Good idea, thanks!