Well, they worked for me on Friday at least. Let’s hope they keep working.
(ahem)
1) rather than work until a job is “finished,” work for exactly an hour on one thing, then take a break and switch to something else, even if you have to stop working in the middle of a sentence. The next day when you pick the task up again, you don’t have to dither about where to dive in, because you have that half-finished sentence from yesterday waiting for you.
2) Rather than write the outline in outline form, write it as a synopsis (full sentences). It works way better for me, for some reason. Much easier to keep focused.
3) When you hit those dreaded halfway-point doldrums, consider the problems you introduced throughout the story so far. Make a list of them, then reverse the order of the list and figure out how your characters solve those problems in that reverse order. Usually the first problem you introduced in the story is the most important one, so it gets dealt with last.