Over the last few months, I’ve started using this trick with my To-Do list; I give every task a point value and I do 10 points of stuff each week night. This is kind of arbitrary, but I take the number of minutes to complete a task and divide by 10. If the task is kind of fun, I cut that number in half. But if the task is pretty terrible, I double it. Neutral tasks are unmodified.
So biking is something I know I should do and it takes about 40 minutes, so it should be a 4 but I like doing it so I call it a 2. On the other hand cleaning out the sink only takes 10 minutes so it should be a 1 but I hate it, so it’s a 2. Laundry takes 20 (active) minutes and it’s kind of neutral, so it stays a 2. That’s how I do it, you should find something that works for you.
Everyday, I sit down with my planner and look at the stuff that has to be done that night (appointments, high-priority tasks) and anything that’s really pressing (grocery shopping, laundry) and put those things down and give them points as described above. It that total is over 10, I start cutting the least important things. If the total is under 10, I look at my backlog and find one or more tasks to fill that gap. My backlog is just where I write down everything that doesn’t have a specific time-frame, but I want to get done someday.
This system has a few advantages that reduce the psychic load of figuring out what to do and doing it. It lets you know when you’ve given yourself enough to do – once I have 10 points and I stop planning and start working on stuff. It gives me confidence that when I put something down as “I will do this tonight”, I’m reasonably confident I will do it. And when I put something on my backlog, I know I’ll get to it when I can. Because I’m doing stuff every night, I make progress at a steady rate. But because I’m not doing too much, I don’t burn out. It helps with planning and can justify putting off a task – not procrastinating – but saying “I have four things that really need my attention tonight, so cleaning the kitchen can wait a day”.
The best part of this system is Being Done. You’ll never actually be done, there’s always more to do. But you’ll get that 10th point and you’ll get the Being Done feeling – this day has been productive and if I sit down and play Minecraft for the next 3 hours, I’ll still go to bed feeling accomplished. And wanting that feeling keeps me excited each night to get through my list quickly so I can relax and enjoy my evening without worry about everything else on my list.
A few simple rules of organization:
As a web developer, I spend a lot of time close to my browser, both testing and research (and surfing for fun). Firefox is my browser of choice and I’ve learned a few tricks over the years that let me work quickly and effectively. 
My favorite place to vacation is Washing DC. It’s a great trip and if you do it right, it can be very cheap. I’ve been there three times in the last six years and here is the wisdom I have gained from those experiences. This article is modeled after the trip I took with a friend the summer after we graduated from high school. We spend four days in DC plus two on the road for a grand total of $500 (in 2003) each. That’s everything, food, gas, hotel and tolls. Any cost cutting measures I suggest here can be substituted with cash. 
I’ve talked about this before, but I wanted to revisit this concept because it’s really helped me out a lot. In Getting Things Done, one of the ideas people really latch onto is the tickler file. A great concept. If you are unfamiliar, the tickler file represents actions to be done on or after a specific date in the future, but are not appointments. They have a date aspect, but not a time specific aspect. Like buying a gift for your wife’s birthday, or preparing your taxes. There is not a specific time and date to do this, but it needs to get done with in a certain two week range (give or take). I’ve forgone the classic set of 43 folders (which I consider bulky) and gone with a Google Calendar solution.
There’s a technique I learned a couple years back that I rely on regularly now, it’s a trick to counting on your fingers that will let you count to nine on one hand and 99 with both hands. The concept is simple, the fingers on your right hand are worth one, the thumb is five, the fingers on your left hand are ten and the thumb is fifty. To make this work, instead of making a fist and sticking fingers out, touch a surface, like a table or your leg. Fingers touching the surface count, fingers not touching don’t. So touch your forefinger on your right hand to the table, that’s one. Add your middle finger, that’s two (two fingers touching the table). Now add your other two fingers, that’s four. Now lift your fingers and touch your thumb, that’s five. Add your forefinger, six. Add the middle finger seven. Ring finger, eight. Now add your pinky, and you have all the finger and the thumb on your right hand touching the table (or your leg) and that’s nine. Lift them all up, and touch the forefinger on your left hand to the table, that’s ten. It’s just keeps going, every time you run out of fingers on your right hand, add a finger on the left. You can count quickly from 1 to 99.
Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to get organized. One of the areas of my life that I’ve really spear-headed and made a lot of progress on is personal data and communications using the tools provided by Google. I took the time to get all my Google accounts stuff set up. Last October I had a few hundred messages sitting in my inbox. Now, most of the ones that I needed to read, I had read, but I hadn’t done anything with them. So I went through and cleaned everything out, but as I did this, I created filters and labels, which is just the way Gmail does things. Since October, I have kept my inbox under 10 items at all times.