The future will be just like today.
James McMurry, a co-worker who's also a good friend, told me very early in both of our careers about a system he had worked up to make sure he was doing a good job. It struck me as being remarkably insightful given his level of experience (maybe a hint he got from his parents), and I use it to this day. Without warning his manager, he started tracking daily hits. His goal was to, each day, have some kind of outstanding accomplishment to report to his manager - some idea he had thought of or implemented that would make his department better.
Simply setting a goal (daily, weekly, or whatever you're capable of) and tracking this type of accomplishment can radically change your behavior. When you start to search for outstanding accomplishments, you naturally go through the process of evaluating and prioritizing your activities based on the business value of what you might work on.
Tracking hits at a reasonably high frequency will ensure that you don't get stuck: if you're supposed to produce a hit per day, you can't spend two weeks crafting the perfect task. This type of thinking and work becomes a habit rather than a major production. And, like a developer addicted to the green bar of a unit test suite, you start to get itchy if you haven't knocked out today's hit. You don't have to worry so much about tracking your progress, because performing at this level becomes more akin to a nervous tic than a set of tasks that need to be planned out in Microsoft Project.
- Chad Fowler, My Job Went to India
