No tips, but will be interested to see if anyone else has some. I have a metric crapload of work to get through in the next few days.

I don't stay productive. That's my trick.

Frequent breaks.

Planning. Seriously, I think through what I need to do with a time frame in mind, and also think ahead to what I need to accomplish in the next week, and also think in AMs about what I need to get done that day. And I mentally congratulate myself each time I finish a chore.

Also, I really try hard to touch everything in my inbox once. I pick it up, I deal with it. No picking up and putting back.

Yeah, I do the timer thing, too (though not as often as I should!) and it works for me. So many tasks seem soooooo overwhelmingly big, but when I just assign myself 15 minutes of [task]? Sure, I can do that!

For me, part of the success of the timer tip (and the hardest part to stick to) is stopping when the timer goes off. Often, I think "Well, that wasn't so bad! I'll keep going!" But that undermines the point of the tip, at least for me, and I'm more reluctant to do it next time. Once I learned to stop within a minute or two of the buzzer, the tip worked much better.