Useful Productivity Skills

Things that seem to help with doing things, in descending order of usefulness.

• Make sure what you're doing is what you want to be doing. It's easy to get lost in introspection this way, so don't do it all the time, set apart a time in the week or on evening walks or whatever and then consider. A lot of productivity advice is unnecessary if you have a proper roadmap of what you're doing and why you're doing it.
• Get the basics in order: sleep, food, exercise. Exercise seems to be the most useful. You can play around with sleep a little bit-I find myself more productive at night, sometimes. (It's hard, because sleep has knock on effects on exercise. Still experimenting.) in general, you want a good energy budget, everything builds on top of that.
• Get your mental health in order. Exercise generally seems to help with this, so does good sleep. Physical and mental health seem to be fairly well correlated, at least for me. The interventions for your particular mental architecture are going to be specific to you, I can't offer general advice. A lot of mental stuff may also feel unfixable, some of that is probably untrue but don't get stuck, fix what you can and move on.
• Read How to be More Agentic, pick up whatever feels useful. I've personally found this to be the best collection of tips for me.
• Do things you find interesting. Intrinsic motivation obviates the need for explicitly thinking about productivity. (Beware: a lot of new skills take time to train to the point where it starts being fun rather than work, learn to stick through that period.)
• For things which aren't intrinsically motivating, create extrinsic motivation. I see people recommend things like Beeminder and accountability partners to guilt yourself into doing things. I'm not a big fan. Create positive extrinsic motivation. Social approval works really well for this-find people who you think are going to be impressed by your work, then use that eventuality as inspiration. Find tangible ways your work is going to be useful to you or to others you like, if that is possible. Find learning partners at your level. (Be careful with this, do not outsource motivation to people who are flaky, it is easy to get into vicious cycles that way.)
• If both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation fail, use discipline as a last resort. It's worth breaking down discipline into subskills, and training them separately. Learn how to be-and stay-bored. Learn how to work even on a low-energy budget. Exercise dovetails well with this, by giving you a larger energy budget and teaching you how to find energy reserves you thought were unavailable to you. (there's a large mental element to having a low-energy budget, you can push through it if needed, it's worth knowing that. It has consequences, pushing-through isn't free, but it's useful to know you can do it because sometimes that tradeoff is useful.)
• On a more tactical level, pomodoros work well for me, specially when switching into work-mode. A half-hour pomodoro gets me into the right headspace to work, such that I generally do not need further pomodoros. Guzey recommends shifting environments, I've found this useful sometimes.