With the start of the New Year, I’ve been trying to audit my approach to productivity, thinking about ways in which I can be more effective in the year to come.

I tend to tag my tasks with relative priorities, and I keep a log of completed work from each day. So, last week, I sorted through the log entries for 2016, to see if I could find any patterns to my efficiency.

In that analysis, something quickly emerged: my daily efficiency had a clear barbell distribution, with stretches in which I banged out huge volumes of work (including my most important tasks), and then stretches in which I barely got anything done (and what little I did accomplish tended to be menial, low-priority stuff).

Thinking back to the floundering, low-productivity days, I could highlight at least one obvious, unproductive behavior: I’d look at my list, feel overwhelmed, and then simply procrastinate by avoiding my list entirely for much of the day. Whereas on days in which I was able to get cranking, I’d simply hop in and get to work, moving directly from one task to the next.

The problem, then, appeared to be one of momentum. Once I was getting things done, it was easy to keep getting things done. But if I felt stuck, I had a hell of a time getting unstuck.

This morning, I was clearly in that ‘stuck’ mode. So, picking up an older idea from British productivity author and tinkerer Mark Forster, I set out to try what he calls the ‘random method.’

In short, I went over to the Random Integer Generator, and created a table of 100 random numbers from 1 through 16. (The 16 there being somewhat arbitrary – it’s my lucky number.)

The first number on the table was an ‘8,’ so I started at the top of my list, and counted down to the eighth task. Whatever it happened to be (in this case, processing a pile of paperwork), I hopped in, did it, and crossed it off the list. Then I went back to the table – this time a ‘6’ – and counted six more tasks down, and did that task next.

If my count took me to the end of the list, I’d simply loop back and keep counting from the top. And if I landed on a task that had already been crossed out, I’d ‘slide’ down until I reached the next uncrossed task.

In that way, I randomly looped my way through a first dozen tasks by noon, accomplishing more this morning than I thought I’d likely get done all day.

I’m not entirely sure why this works, though I suspect it has to do with removing the element of choice – if I had to decide what I wanted to do next, I could simply avoid making a decision and do nothing. But if the integers ‘told’ me that I had to do something, that was just enough external pressure to spur me into action.

Admittedly, this is a slightly ridiculous approach. I’m not sure if it will similarly be able to jump-start me on future ‘stuck’ days, and it’s certainly more cumbersome than simply trying to choose the next most important or appropriate task on days when I don’t need the extra push.

But it’s something I’ll certainly be testing out over the weeks ahead. On the chance that you, too, sometimes avoid your to-do list entirely in favor of scrolling through Twitter or diving into the rabbit-hole of Wikipedia, perhaps it’s worth similarly giving it a try.