Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

Step 1: develop meta-awareness of your state of mind. Step 2: pattern-match to identify your mind's most common modes. One typical pattern is that my mind starts looking for distractions. Now the key is to embrace these different states of mind instead of fighting against them. In distraction mode, my mind is looking for new inputs. Obviously, your mind probably works differently and might have different modes. The most important takeaway is that learning to observe your mind, to categorize the different states it can be in, and then embracing them is an incredible superpower.