Actually, a few years ago, after I started implementing a couple of tips I found on Lifehacker and 43 Folders, like Merlin's great "Inbox Zero" talk, I did become a lot more productive. I no longer spent several hours a day on email. I never had to spend time wondering what it was that I had to do "now," because I had a list of ongoing projects in one central location listed by priority.

The only problem is that the marginal returns on such implementations diminish very quickly, so after you've got the big ones down--like breaking down big, intimidating tasks into smaller, doable ones and realizing that you don't need email to auto-update every 5 minutes at every hour of the day--there's not much to gain from reading productivity blogs.

The big problem is that is it easy to get caught up in the huge initial improvements and fail to realize that the time you gain from implementing these marginal improvements is less than the time you already spent on implementing the improvement itself. It's especially bad if you're the typical geek like me and enjoy fiddling with programs and plugins and constantly trying to solve "third order" problems, even when they don't actually do anything in practice. However, exploiting this weakness is exactly what most productivity blogs do to keep their traffic up, so I now have a lot more respect for Merlin, who's actually trying to do something about this problem.