Ask HN: How do you manage projects?

Since February, I've been running my ISV/startup full-time. I've done a terrible job and released very little, but at the same time I've been lucky in that sales have quadrupled and I'm making more than I did at my job. And I finally have some idea what's going to happen to the company over the next 6 months or so, and a couple new products in development.

However, I've realized that to get over the current hump and be able to meet next year's goals, I'm going to need to be a lot more disciplined.

There have been a few weeks this year where I've been able to stay focused for most of the day and get a lot of stuff done -- usually I set micro-deadlines for particular features or aspects of a certain project. But that's pretty rare.

Lately, I tend to wake up and work on whatever strikes my fancy out of the available things to work on, get demotivated after a few hours, then go do something else or do administrative work/support. It's absolutely pathetic, especially compared to some of the better weeks I've had.

I've gotten better at estimating how long stuff will take and figuring out the complexity of a project before doing it, but I've had the hardest time lately setting schedules for any of my projects. Even when I have most of the project mapped out. And as a result, I wake up and burn a lot of energy trying to figure out what to work on next.

So I need a better framework for planning things out on a day-to-day/week-to-week level. I get pretty uneasy whenever I sit down to do it and never come up with anything.

Most software packages for project management seem to be extremely complicated. And a lot of books (e.g. the recent Scott Berkun one) seem to be focused on managing projects in a big company with lots of people and dependencies.

So where should I go to educate myself about this kind of thing? Is this something I really need to learn about, or am I just procrastinating by thinking about something so meta?