Lately I have come up with a phrase that I have been experimenting with that I believe is really quite useful to frequently ask yourself.
It is:
“What am I doing, why am I doing it, the way I'm doing it and how could it be done better?”
Try it -- It's amazing how just asking yourself this at times when you least expect asking it will make a difference, makes a difference... you then think of ingenious new ways of doing something that you have been doing for a long time (in a poor way)... or alternatively decide that what you are doing really isn't that important after asking they why part and should possibly just be stopped.
It even stretches to fit with mundane things, you could ask yourself it as you are walking up the stairs and decide running up 3 at a time from now on would be better (or if it's really important to you maybe you might invest in an escalator). Or as you are making your cereal for breakfast you might have a think about it after asking the question and decide from now on that bananas on top from now on would be good for you and probably taste good too.
Stopping yourself as you are dredging through your inbox trying to sort it out... step back, ask how could it be done better, you remember that you can sort by subject or from address..sweet.
Ask yourself when someone's noisy twitter feed keeps popping up and distracting you... why? Well I still want to follow them.... but decide it would be better to download a twitter client that allows you to add that person to a special group that does not show you a popup notification (like TweekDeck).
Or you get annoyed at how you never seem to be able to reach the phone before the answer machine kicks in, actually take the 5 minutes out to find the setting to increase the number of rings instead of just not being bothered to.
Maybe you can never find your car keys, you could consider buying a key rack and have it installed by your front door for you to get into the habit of putting them on when you come in.
Basically a process of continual minor improvements (the Japanese know it as “Kaizen”) - until eventually (over years) you are a sleeked well oiled productivity machine.
The process never stops - but you are reaping the benefits of all the other improvements in the mean time (which are now on autopilot).
This obviously also suits work life at an even more meta scale - applying it to a business process, for example, and of course right down to that portion of code that you are writing (being careful not to get stuck in a continual loop of perfectionism however) - just little chunks, when you can manage it.
A previous Brazillian colleague of mine, Edge, descibes another important thing to do at the end of every day, where you ask yourself:
"What have I done today that I could have done better?".
Edge suggests actually writing the answer to this question down which is a good idea as there may be more than one, and items that may need to be fed back into your task list.
If you asked yourself the first question as often as you could remember (eventually though it just becomes a feeling) and the second question every day, then just imagine the improvements that you will see over time.