Productivity blogger Merlin Mann says he wasn't nearly as ruffled by yesterday's Gmail outage as many folks were because he organizes his tasks using GTD-style contexts. Any given project he is working on has next actions in a multitude of contexts, like "@phonecalls," "@web," and "@email." Mann writes:

So if you forgot your phone, skip "@calls," and move to anything else. Boss out to lunch? Skip "@Boss," and move to anything else. Internet went down? Skip @web, and move to anything else. Gmail is down? Yes! You've already guessed it! Skip "@email" and move to anything else. Anything else. Anything. Else.

With tasks put in the right contexts (instead of piled up in your email inbox), you won't be left flailing helplessly if utility workers accidentally sever your broadband link.

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Windows/Mac/Linux (Thunderbird): Harness the to-do-managing power of Remember the Milk from inside your mail reader with an alpha extension for Thunderbird. Once installed and authenticated with your RTM account, the task manager provided by the Lightning extension will have bi-directional access to your tasks, which you can add, delete, modify, and prioritise from inside your mail manager. Hit the video above to see a few of the things you can do with the extension, and hit the via link below for step-by-step installation instructions. Remember the Milk Provider extension is a free download, but requires a free Mozilla Add-Ons account to download, needs the Lightning calendar extension, and works wherever Thunderbird does.

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Windows only: Killing runaway, memory-gobbling processes from Windows' task manager is easy—if you know the name of every process and thread on your system and which apps they match up with. Daphne, a free Windows process management utility, gives you a unique set of crosshairs to drag onto the window of any app giving you trouble. There's also a magnifying glass that reveals properties and even passwords of any window it stops on, and Daphne can call back to its DRK database to identify any apps you might want exlained. Daphne is a free download for Windows systems only. For more tools and tips on knocking down memory-grabbers, see our guide to mastering Windows' Task Manager.

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You've cleared out some time, you're itching to tackle that cluttered and messy closet, and ... 20 minutes later, you're reminiscing over some old photos you found. Staying on track while tackling organisation projects can be tough, as your ideas and findings pull you in many directions at once. Real Simple's suggestion: Put an alarm clock in the room where you're working and set the buzzer to go off 10 minutes after you start.

When it beeps, assess what you've done and then hit the snooze button. When it goes off again, see if you've accomplished more in the next chunk of time. Keep hitting the snooze button until you're finished with your project. People who can hyper-focus will find this method really annoying and won't want to use it. But, if your mind frequently wanders, this could be a great tool for you.

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Lifehacker reader and mental state blogger Luciano writes about his main problem with creating a master task list, in the style of Getting Things Done: The "giant blob of threatening commitments" they can become after awhile. To keep a level head and get a daily feeling of accomplishment, he recommends the following:

Take your to-do list and pick a few tasks that you will do the next day: not tasks that you want to do, or tasks that you think you might do -- but tasks that you wholeheartedly commit to do. Replace your long list of intentions with a short list of commitments.

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If you're an index card junkie but you end up with a bottomless pile of cards before you have a chance to process your tasks, weblog LifeClever suggests ditching traditional index cards in favor of color-coded shorty flash cards. Then tasks can be easily distinguished using red, yellow, and green cards thusly:

• Tasks to process immediately on returning to my desk.
• Tasks to process before the end of the work day.
• Tasks to leave for my Weekly Review.

If your most important tasks often get lost in the sea of your other to-dos, the colour-coded flash card method is a smart solution.

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The Web Worker Daily blog pulls a snippet from one of the latest business-advice tomes, Susan L. Reid's Discovering Your Inner Samurai, one that speaks to a way of choosing from all your possible actions (Answer email? Do research? Crank widgets?) when you don't have a logical next step. Reid's suggestion:

Two priorities; one-month commitment. That's all. Of course, if you can, you might narrow that priority down to one. Most of us, though, unless we are in an extreme situation, will have two.

That doesn't, of course, mean skipping everything else for one month, but dividing your year into 12 chances to hone in on something that could use a little more attention than it usually gets—like keeping a workspace clean, in my case. How do you go about giving tasks priority and choosing what gets done next? Share your own samurai code in the comments.

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Everyone has their everyday tasks that just need to get done, and it's a good idea to set up some kind of system in order to accomplish these. However, the "big projects" can get lost in the shuffle. Productivity blogger Cal Newport suggests setting up a system that helps you get a bigger picture of what you are trying to get done—in other words, your life goals versus your everyday goals. Instead of being task-centric, his focus is completion-centric: a list of really big projects that will probably take a lot of time and effort to finish in addition to your everyday to-do list. Completing tasks on this list will potentially give you a larger sense of accomplishment. How do you handle the big picture tasks? Let's hear in the comments.

We all have to deal with an incredible amount of information, tasks, projects, etc. every single day. The Thinking Blog suggests an intriguing way to deal with all of this: develop a scientific mindset.

Scientists must shift through tonnes of data in very efficient ways. How do they do it? By first defining a hypothesis and then looking for information that either corroborates or refutes that hypothesis. For example, an untrained person could spend months in "boiling the ocean" and trying to read as much as possible, in a very unstructured way, about how stress affects our brain. A trained scientist would first define specific hypotheses or preliminary assumptions, such as "Stress reduces the brain's ability to generate new neurons" or "We can learn how to manage stress", and look specifically for data that corroborates or refutes those sentences. Which will probably happen faster, and enable him or her to refine the hypotheses further, based on accumulated knowledge, in a virtuous learning cycle.

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Dustin of Lifehack.org has written how he's currently facing a pretty overwhelming real life situation, and how he's dealing with must-do tasks—prioritising:

Taking a few minutes to figure out what you have to do tomorrow or today is essential to weathering a disaster, or rather, taking a moment to decide what you can manage without doing. I can't miss class; the consequences for my students are too extreme and take too much work to deal with; but I can miss watching a video I'm evaluating to show my students, or a trip to the library to do research for a paper due in 6 months.

No matter how productive we aim to be, life just sometimes throws us a curveball. How have you handled these kinds of situations and still managed to keep at least some productivity going? Let's hear in the comments.