You're welcome. Sorry for being self-referential, but we really did put our best productivity advice in the book -- Chapter 3: Spend Your Time Wisely. Here are the "Key Takeaways" from that chapter (there is a little section at the end of each).

* Choose activities to work on based on their relevance to your north star.

* Focus your time on just one of these truly important activities at a time (no multitasking!), making it the top idea on your mind.

* Select between options based on opportunity cost models.

* Use the Pareto principle to find the 80/20 in any activity and increase your leverage at every turn.

* Recognize when you’ve hit diminishing returns and avoid negative returns.

* Use commitment and the default effect to avoid present bias, and periodic evaluations to avoid loss aversion and the sunk-cost fallacy.

* Look for shortcuts via existing design patterns, tools, or clever algorithms. Consider whether you can reframe the problem.

> Consider whether you can reframe the problem.

This to me has been perhaps one of the most useful tool when I'm struggling with something. The fable of NASA's space pen [0] is good marker to invoke this.

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-write-stuff/

How would you tackle multiple priorities/north stars? What if I want to be the best parent I can be and save enough for retirement? I can't put off being a parent until I have enough to retire on, nor can I wait to start saving for retirement until after I'm "done" being a parent.

Stronger: I can't put being a parent on hold to write my book. Not if I already have kids. I can't put it on hold to build my career, or launch my startup. They need you today, not when your "north star" is done.

* Use the Pareto principle to find the 80/20 in any activity and increase your leverage at every turn.

Awesome, thanks for the reply! Guess I'll make a point to read your book then :-)

> I wish I had learned many of these years earlier. In fact, the proximate cause for posting this was so I could more effectively answer the question I frequently get from people I work with: “what should I learn next?” If you’re trying to be generally effective, my best advice is to start with the things on this list. [1]

[1] https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-use... by @yegg, the link he shared in his comment.

I have a feeling that this book is _the_ advice. It's literally in the subtitle: "Upgrade Your Reasoning and Make Better Decisions with Mental Models". I imagine mental models have a lot to do with managing and balancing one's life.