I suffer a great deal from the second part of that last paragraph.  I can easily be overcome by the fear of failure that it will prevent me from even starting, from making even the smallest amount of progress on a project.   It’s a funny thing, because that fear can be completely replaced with amazing focus, long nights and constant thoughts about the next task you can knock off that list as soon as you make even the smallest amount of progress.  Just seeing a small amount of progress being made can swing your attitude from one end of the spectrum to the other.  Gary Vaynerchuk has a great video that really put this concept into words for me,  Better Than Zero.  it doesn’t always have to be about the big win right?

One of my own personal tricks when working on a project that i’m having trouble getting motivated on is to re factor some of the code I’ve already written, it’s a small amount of effort that has a big impact on boosting my motivation.  Refactoring cleans things up, get’s your head into writing code and generally in my case motivates me to write a whole bunch of new code using some of the patterns I may have re factored to while getting myself in the mood as it were

So how do you get yourself out of these types of ruts?  Got any tips or tricks for getting yourself into the zone?

1. 37 Signals Backpack – I had pages split up into categories then would use lists on the page to store the links to the sites, didn’t work very well because it required a huge amount of manual work
2. Delicious – The obvious and one of the most popular solutions, I don’t know why but I don’t like it, I’ve never been able to integrate it into my computer use habits.
3. Google Reader – Using the “Note in reader” bookmarklet and tags in google reader this has been the best solution I’ve come across so far (but the tagging can get messy)
4. Gmail – For a long time I would simply send myself an email and then move it to a bookmarks folder, didn’t really like this solution either
5. Posterous – Just signed up for an account here, it’s got a great bookmarklet as well but not sure about tags just yet as I’ve barely started using it!

These external forces can come at you from many different avenues.  Work, family, kids… all the usual suspects.  Everyone needs something from you now so how do you deal with it?

Prioritize
You can’t possibly do everything for everyone all the time, it doesn’t work and if you think you can do it you are truly more optimistic then I am!  I used to think that saying yes to everyone regardless of the outcome would make them happy, and it always did… in the short term.  When faced with a stressful situation I tend to break up stuff I have to do into mini lists.  A list with the 3 most important things I have to do next on it.  This list becomes my guiding light until those 3 tasks (and hopefully the stress and pressure) are gone.

Stop, think and then react
Often times when you are faced with a screaming client, boss or 2 year old your immediate reaction is to do something immediately, and to be honest that is probably what the person on the other end is expecting from you as well.  Over the years my ability to react has gotten slower (age maybe?) I don’t always make the best off the cuff decisions.  Over the last 6 months at my job we have instituted a Stop, Think, React culture.  It’s amazing how much of a difference these 3 simple steps can make in a pressure situation, understanding and information are the key’s to good decision making so why deny yourself the opportunity to explore those options when you need them the most?

These are just some of my thoughts on handling pressure and stress, what other kinds of things do you do to make sure you can handle those high pressure situations?

I’ve gone back to using backpackit to manage my personal time (still going to use outlook for work stuff, makes the most sense for now). Backpackit is the perfect tool for dealing with small projects and personal things. A couple of problems still need to be worked out with the new calendar feature in backpackit and a couple of core improvements that would be nice but i’m thinking that this is going to be a permanent fixture in my personal mission to organize my life.

The one thing that worries me though is that google is going to come up with some similar version of backpackit and i’m going to have to ditch it for sure. Google did just announce it’s Apps for your Domain today (i do have a Google Hosted Account) but the only new stuff in here is the page maker which is a bit cheese if you ask me.

Overall backpackit is a great product, I think the guys at 37 signals do a great job of keeping things simple while keeping things useful at the same time.

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