* 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.