I like the triad he breaks it down into. Here's the tricks I try to get over missing one leg of the tripod:

> Energy and Direction, No Time

I have a wife, kids, pets and work full time so this is my default state. Things that help:

1. Get off my damn phone / reddit / twitter / whatever. Consuming media on the Internet is junk food for the attention span. I have had way too many evenings after I get the kids in bed where I think, "I'll just unwind on my phone for a few minutes and then work on something." The next thing I know, it's three hours later, every animated GIF and cute kitten link on Reddit is purple, and I'm filled with regret.

I trying now to break my habit of consuming stuff on the web. It's ultimately not satisfying. A little news-reading is important, but any more than fifteen minutes a day or so is wasted.

This frees up an astonishing amount of time.

2. Get better at working on things in small pieces. I'm writing a book right now that's projected to be about 200,000 words. It builds up two implementations of the same programming language, and each implementation is spread across multiple chapters, so the book is highly intertwined.

You might expect that to require a ton of mental state and lot writing sessions to work on. Nope. I usually work on it less than an hour a day (which, granted, means it's going to take forever to finish). I rely on a test suite, Git, a log, and notes to myself to make it easier to pause and resume work on it and break it down into small pieces.

3. Decide what not to spend time on. Our natural tendency is to want to say yes to things -- new projects, new hobbies, new outings, new toys to play with. But since time is finite, each of those means cutting out something that's already in my life. I try to be more cognizant of that and proactively choose to not invest time in things I don't want to be doing right now even if I would like to.

> Direction and Time, No Energy

For me, this is usually laziness or analysis paralysis. Some amount of laziness is OK -- nothing wrong with some chilling and self-care. Relaxing feels good, but I find it doesn't feel as good as the satisfaction of accomplishing something, so I try to remember that.

Analysis paralysis is my personal demon. I try to remember that anything is generally a more productive path than getting stuck and doing nothing. If I'm stuck because I don't have enough information to pick a path, walking down one path is a great way to get that information, even if it requires some backtracking later.

> Energy and Time, No Direction

For me, this is usually analysis paralysis at a larger scale. The kids are finally out of the house and I've got four hours of free time. What project should I work on? Oh, God, I can't pick. Again, I try to force myself to pick something because any choice is better than no choice.

I don't personally often have the vague "I don't know what I want to do at all" problem I hear a lot from bloggers. I think many of those are coming from people who want to be a certain thing (author, entrepreneur, successful open source project lead, etc.) and don't want to do a certain thing (edit paragraphs, make sales cold calls, reply to bug reports for five hours).

They want the reward of the cachet associated with the identity but either don't want to or don't know how to do the work to get that. Personally, I'm generally more motivated by the process than the product, so I don't fall into that trap very often. I don't have enough self-discipline to spend time on things when I don't enjoy the basic mechanical process of it.