Everybody gets in a productivity funk from time to time.

We’ve all had days or weeks when we just can’t seem to get much done, and as more and more work begins to pile up, things can easily spiral out of control. We don’t know where to start, we feel bad that we’re in this funk to begin with, and the world looks bleak.

I was helping a student work through a productivity funk the other day, and I put a few ideas down on paper. The next time you’re feeling unproductive, see if you can improve your situation using one of these strategies.

We all get 24 hours.

You and me. Stephen King and Margaret Atwood. Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano. Caroline Shaw and John Luther Adams.

Warren Buffett’s billions can’t buy him a single 25-hour day, and neither can Donald Knuth’s race against the clock to complete his monumental life’s work.

Every day we’re forced to choose between chipping away at difficult, important work or scattering our attention over hundreds of tiny, trivial tasks (and lately, that’s been me). Three points for both of us to remember, then:

YouTube isn’t free. Neither is Facebook. Neither is TV.

Now, more than ever, our attention is for sale. Advertisers have been in our living rooms for decades, but now they’re in our pockets, too. We get entertainment, and advertisers get a moment of our attention. It’s a square deal.

But we’re changed by the messaging we see, whether we realize it or not. It’s best not to think of these tools as free. They’re products we pay to use, and the cost is a tiny bit of our mind. It may be a price worth paying, and I’m actually not trying to argue otherwise. It’s a personal decision.

Do you remember what decision-making was like before the internet?

I’m 31, just old enough to remember life before constant connection. If you needed information, you asked the smartest people you knew and read the best books you could get your hands on. It was a laborious process, but it had a natural end point: you gathered what information you could, and that was it. Time to decide.

Ours is a brave new world. Information-gathering has become exponentially easier, and that’s mostly a good thing. It’s pretty amazing to pull out my smartphone, google “mantis shrimp” and double my shrimp-related knowledge in two minutes. (And you should do that, by the way: the mantis shrimp is a top-notch shrimp.)

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. — Jesus

Two days ago, I sat at a stoplight behind five other cars waiting to make a left turn.

It was a bright, sunny day, and I knew the intersection well. The left arrow was notoriously short, and and I realized that with five cars in front of me, I might be waiting through a second red light.