How is it possible to keep making such cute things? This one definitely looks very @m31. I keep saying this but this is a new favourite of mine. How many favourites am I allowed to have? Ah... it's just got that perfect cute style of yours that I love so much. This series is the best thing to happen to your blog in a long time. It's resulting in an unprecedented volume of creative cuteness and I highly approve. _
Focusing on many things at once has created this illusion of not getting much done. Maybe it is not an illusion at all.
Maybe it's an illusion for you... for me I've found the more things I take on at once, the less I actually get done. I think I especially suck at multitasking, like a lot more than others. Honestly humans can't really multitask. We're just expected to be good at context-switching, and some of us are, but I'm really not. That's the world we live in, though, so I continue to try to adapt...
But how to trick your brain to work on only one thing at the time when you know you have other things waiting to be worked on that are just as fun?
I'm not 100% sure; let me know if you figure it out for yourself. I've been trying some things to tackle my own version of this problem. Something I'm having a lot of short-term success with recently is the Pomodoro technique. It allows me to dedicate the next X minutes to one specific task, with frequent enough interruptions to both keep me sane and also provide opportunities to acknowledge and correct a distraction ("oh... it's been 25 minutes already? I got distracted reading this Wikipedia article...")
As for the long term, I've been trying to integrate GTD into my life but it's proving a bit difficult to keep a disciplined approach (in fact, writing this comment inspires me to pick it up again).
An interesting and quite relevant underlying concept in GTD is that it is exactly this sort of mental "clutter"—I want/need to do all of these things!—that cripples our productivity. I know that, for me personally, this rings especially true; my mind is constantly racing with ideas, anxieties, aspirations, commitments... and in conjunction with my ailing mental health over the past year or so it created this feedback loop that simply spiralled out of control. I'm still picking up the pieces... slowly...
So anyway, to deal with this, one of the core concepts of GTD is capture; removing stuff (ideas, aspirations, etc.) from floating around in our brains. When we have all that stuff floating around up there, we get anxious to let go of it because it might not come back. GTD provides a framework for getting those things out of our brains and into tools (as simple as a notebook, or as complex as a smartphone application) which we trust to hold onto them for us so that we can deal with them at a more appropriate time. The theory is that with all that stuff out of our brains, we can truly focus on the thing we want to be doing right now.
Like I said, I'm still working on getting there. Maybe you should have a look too though. Someone I know might be able to get you the book... :P
EDIT: Oh, and... I pick 7 and 11 again since they are still there xD
RE: Strange Creatures: Wave Elephant