I have just read a post entitled “Multitask poisoning” about how to organize yourself to do research. The main argument is that interruptions kill your productivity because of the overhead time that you need to reach the concentration point necessary for research activities.
Actually, I think that for most of the work I do, this overhead is always needed. So what I am going to write here can be probably extended for any kind of work, not only research activities.
In the past, I used to work doing many things at the same time, and trying a lot of different stuff to get things done, like the well-known Getting Things Done methodology. While attempting to apply that methodology, I have tried many different approaches, from todo lists, extensions to GMail, careful scheduling of my daily tasks, including the two-dimensional matrix of urgent and important tasks, etc.
After all that work to get my work done, I have extracted only a couple of useful issues. The first one is that I discovered the Emacs Org Mode, and thus I improved my Emacs skills (I use now Emacs for most of my activities). The other issue that I discovered that (at least for me) the only way to get things done, it is to do one thing at once, and avoid to juggle with many simultaneous tasks.
This might seem kind of obvious, but when you have to face a lot of work, with pressures, deadlines, etc, you might use all this self-help-like crap to fool yourself, thinking that you are actually “getting things done” because you have everything carefully organized and so under control. The truth is that you usually end up doing a lot of tasks that are not providing any value to you, like meetings, bureaucratic-like stuff, and in general little things that do not demand any kind of concentration to get them done, and using those tasks as a dope, convincing yourself that you have just had a very productive day (hey, you removed a lot of bullets from the todo lists!).
The truth is doing stuff is not removing bullet points from a todo list, and that the only way of getting (real) things done is with time, effort and concentration. That means no interruptions while working, and not leaving a task until you finish it, rather than continuously switching task because on Tuesday afternoon you do X-type tasks.
Finally, all these organization methods shift your thoughts, making you worry about how to do more stuff. And at least for research, I think that what is usually better is to have time to think about the things you are doing, and about what to do next. If you keep your mind busy all the time, new ideas will never come. Ironically, I think that in the long term you end up doing more things with this approach of doing less things because of the new ideas that come when your mind is idle.
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