Top 5 Productivity Methods Worth a Second Try After You Quit Them

The systems everyone abandons by Thursday, ranked by how well they hold up when you come crawling back.

1. 1

   Pomodoro Technique — Francesco Cirillo

   Twenty-five minutes is short enough to fool your brain into starting, and starting is where most of the battle is lost anyway.

2. 2

   Getting Things Done — David Allen

   The full system is a lot, but the weekly review alone is worth the comeback, even if your contexts never get past @computer.

3. 3

   Eisenhower Matrix

   Sorting tasks into four boxes shows you, rudely, how much of your day goes to things that are urgent and don't matter at all.

4. 4

   Bullet Journal — Ryder Carroll

   Forget the Instagram spreads; the plain version with dots and dashes works great and doesn't need a single washi tape.

5. 5

   Inbox Zero — Merlin Mann

   It was always about deciding faster, not about hitting an empty inbox, and it works much better once you stop treating it as a purity test.