1. A few years ago I was frustrated by the sense that hours kept disappearing from my life and I had no idea where they were going. So I started tracking how I was spending each hour, every day for maybe 2 years, in a google sheet. This unfortunately didn't solve the problem, but at least I knew.
2. Here's a cute trick in the vein of structured procrastination, that we might call "structured Hamming procrastination": find out the two most important problems in your life, then work on the second most important one to procrastinate working on the first most important one. Still a big improvement over what most people do.
3. Have complicated thoughts about this. The short and unsatisfying summary is something about breaking through Schelling fences.

I think that satisficing is sometimes the right way to approach tasks. I would classify a whole slew of tasks as not super important but still needing to be done. It isn't always worth it to pour energy into everything you do. As someone who errs on the side of perfectionism too often, I find the concept of succeeding with no wasted motion to be a sanity saver.

Are you better at achieving your values since Hammertime Day 1? If so, what helped?

I think so - the following themes have mainly stuck out in the past few weeks:

• Noticing - paying a bit more attention to my reactions and inspecting them with more curiosity
• Clarity - writing out my semi stream of consciousness here has shown me patterns in my thoughts that I couldn't see in my head
• CoZE - I've been making an attempt to try new things and to notice when I have arbitrary unwritten rules
• Doing rather than simulating - actually doing the exercises is much different than just thinking about them. Actually writing is much different than thinking about writing something. This has transferred a outside of Hammertime (I'm a broken record on this one)
• Reductionism + recursion - Gives a great general framework for solving known unknowns
• Trusting past me - I've noticed that I'm more willing to respect the choices and plans of the me of a few days/weeks ago. I'm tired currently, and I know it's arbitrary, but the me of 20 days ago said he would comment every day, so I'm going to respect his wishes and do it.

Overall, I think writing out my thoughts, CoZE, and trusting my past self have given me the biggest benefits so far, which surprises me.

I do think I've gotten better at achieving my values over the course of Hammertime. the biggest way that's manifested has been in how I'm spending my time. I'm spending more time reading books and talking to friends rather than aimlessly browsing the internet or playing videogames. Interestingly enough, I've actually been spending less time working, which I wasn't consciously trying to do but I think is positive, as I generally work somewhat too hard. 

Reflecting back on the bug list for the second time, I only came up with a modest number of additional bugs. The list currently stands at 132 bugs, of which I've solved 38. My favorite bug solve was to finally get around to hanging some art in the empty space near my desk. 

Since day 1 some change and progress

• Most of all self confidence and self trust were improved by having a commitment to spend 1hr daily at the Hammertime work. Keeping regular progress reduces tension I felt at every thought of undertaking something from self-development
• Reignited something that I've lost - light morning exercise:

I have evening TAP of putting yoga mat out before going to bed (+design). And morning TAP of jumping out of bed to have a sip of water and short stretching.

With the idea that I'd add more things to this morning activity

• With timers and bug lists I've done several things that were easy one-offs, but I weren't being done. Like small home improvements.
• Right now apart from Hammertime I'm working on setting up GTD system, hopeful that I'll make it stick for a while this time. That seems like a very important thing to add

Are you better at achieving your values since Hammertime Day 1? If so, what helped?

I've been able to (probably lastingly) resolve ~20 bugs so far¹ and make notable improvements in a few areas of my life. Also my productivity increased by roughly 40% since starting hammertime, which however could have various causes (plus, last year too I was most productive during the summer months).

Regarding whether it helped me achieve my values, "no clear values" remains as one of my unresolved bugs, so I can't really tell.

I'd say the things that helped the most are yoda timers and murphyjitsu. TAPs tend to not work very well for me, but when they do, they're also very useful.

¹) That really isn't too much, and I realize it would make sense to allocate a few hours every week to just do some introspection and working on my bugs. So far I've mostly just followed hammertime and didn't do much on top, but I guess the greatest value lies in utilizing all this stuff consistently.

No dramatic improvement from Hammertime for me, but I do think it's been helpful for increasing my sense of agency - that I can solve problems (and it's often much easier than expected), that I can make and keep commitments (at least sometimes), that I have tools for working on issues in my life. (But also Hammertime isn't the only thing I'm doing right now with somewhat similar goals, so tracking causality is maybe especially hard.)

Counterpoints:

1) Yes, everyone's after your time and energy. But what is it for? You got to decide -- you can't really hoard it, you must give it somewhere. As long as you're making the decision, it's okay to give it to people or activities clamoring for it.

2) I don't like the idea at all. Big problems in your field are usually big for a reason. By all means, don't just accept that: study them, think about them. Either you'll understand why they're hard, or you'll come up with something interesting. But most often, you'll understand why they're hard. It's probably a better use of your time to go after paths of least resistance with low(er) hanging fruits.

Going after these problems usually makes for shitty motivation. Go after something fun, go after something you like. Then you might see it through the end. If we're using physicists as examples, Feynman is famous for investigating wobbly plates movements after Los Alamos, a direction that eventually netted him the Nobel. He did it because it felt fun.

3) Satisficing is very often useful. Especially if you're a perfectionist. You clarified in the comment above that you were thinking about situations where you are stuck with the outcome already decided. Then it's indeed fine to make the most of your time there, but that's not clear from the article.