I got a prescription for adderall and it's doing wonderful things to my ability to concentrate. I've gotten SO much done in the past week. As with all things related to your health, diet, exercise, and hydration are important, but a brain chemistry issue can be easily solved with a pill.
Thank you!
I'd learned and used various techniques to structure my day, such as breaking down projects, scheduling, reminders and what have you but the medication has been in key in both bringing all that together and amplifying my abilities. It's like I'm looking at a whole new world.
Even if you don't do 25/5/40 style Pomodoro, you can try the simple version: set a timer for 5 minutes. You're going to make yourself work on something for that 5 minutes, after which you can bail if you're bored or dislike it. 9/10 times you'll continue through until you finish (yay hyperfocus). If you do bail, take a break for half an hour and then take another run at either that task or a different one.
That technique is actually really useful for getting started on stuff. It combats the bit where you can't estimate your own tasks very well so everything looks huge before you begin it. Also combats the bit where you're sure you can wait until the last minute, but get caught out because, again, you can't estimate well.
I've also found Getting Things Done to work well for me, or its simpler variant, Zen to Done. There's also Personal Kanban, handful of other methods. Just don't get too caught up in the methodology itself at the expense of doing actual work, and maybe give a try to simple task lists first.
Whichever way you track it, first thing in the day, write down stuff you're going to do. Make sure at least one thing is actually a useful thing to be doing so that you're always moving forward. Then do those. At the end of the day, make sure you review so you know what you did and didn't do. And write down stuff you didn't plan for that you did anyway--you deserve the credit!
If you don't get all the planned stuff done, make your list smaller the next day--you either have an estimation problem around not knowing your unplanned work, or you're just fooling yourself as to your velocity. Even if you eventually end up with a task "list" of one (remember, useful!) task per day, you're still moving forward. Once you know how to move forward at all, you can start making incremental improvements towards moving forward two tasks, three tasks, etc.
That approach works pretty well in objective-based jobs like coding, where it's usually ok to have some uneven speed for awhile as long as you don't fully stall and as long as you eventually ramp up. My experience is that, deadlines be damned, most people who care about your output are considerably more worried about you being reliable and honest about your velocity than the velocity itself. The latter can always be improved as long as the former is there.
Edit: also watch sleep, diet, exercise, get meds, etc. But none of those change bad study/work habits learned before you get things under control physically. The above addresses those.