This article, ‘ How to be a leader in your field ‘, is technically a guide for students in professional schools, but I found it to have a lot of great advice for anyone interested in becoming better and more productive at her job.
One excerpt:
Write down all the difficulties that seem to recur in your experience of practicing your profession – anything, however small, that often seems to go wrong. Or else become an anthropologist for a day, and hang out with some people – students, immigrants, new customers, etc – who are dealing with your profession for the first time. Experience consternation at the difficulties they run into. Collect a dozen difficulties. Then start making theories of what causes those difficulties. Big, pretentious theories are best, especially if they exaggerate how important the difficulties you’ve listed really are. Elaborate your theories in [...]

Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist,  compared two studies . One said that happy workers are more successful, and the other said that sad workers are more productive. His conclusion:
Now, if you were to describe the job of a CEO versus the job of a lower level worker, I think you might say the CEO needs to be successful (as opposed to productive) whereas the lower level worker needs to be productive (as opposed to successful). Ideally, everyone should be both successful and productive, but in terms of importance, you would prefer a successful CEO over one who has more meetings, or however else you would measure “productivity” in that job. And a factory worker, for example, needs to be productive more than he needs to “succeed,” if success even has meaning in that sort of job.
So it follows from the science that [...]