1. Pursue worthy dreams – Set goals that give you a sense of purpose and make you feel good when you take action towards achieving them. Make a list of how achieving this goal will change your life and read through your reasons each day.
2. Build self confidence – Believe you can achieve your goals. Make a list of all your prior accomplishments and what you did to make your dreams a reality. Each success will give you the confidence to move forward with your current pursuit.
3. New perspectives – Be willing to consider things from other perspectives. Read books, watch movies, and talk to people who have differing beliefs than yours.
4. Passions – Set goals you are passionate about achieving and that make you happy during your journey, not just when you achieve them.
5. Relationships – Enjoy spending time with your family and friends whenever you can.
6. Push yourself – Yes, the road to success is paved with setbacks, but push yourself to make the extra effort to overcome challenges. When you work hard towards something, success is sweeter.
7. Beware of toxic people – You only awaken with so much energy each day. Don’t let the negativity of others dampen your spirits.
8. Be authentic – Take the high road towards your goals rather than cheating, lying or undermining others.
9. If at first you don’t succeed – Try. Try again. You’ve heard the saying.
10. Be a finisher – It’s easy to start something. It’s much more difficult to finish.
11. Preparation and practice - Just as no one runs a marathon without training, be prepared to practice and put in the work to achieve your goals.
12. Stop procrastinating – It just delays your progress.
13. Don’t be a perfectionist – Perfection is the enemy of finishing.
14. Visualize it – See yourself achieving your goals each day. Spend 5 minutes each morning visualizing success.
15. Get leverage on yourself – Find someone to hold you accountable and report to them regularly. Offer to pay them cash or clean their house or some other task you don’t want to do if you don’t do what you say. Websites like stickk.com can also help you commit to taking action.

As Wayne Gretzky once said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” Time passes by regardless of whether you are taking action or not. Wouldn’t you rather make the most of it?

1. Set goals. What do you want to accomplish? By setting goals, you decide in advance what your priorities are and which activities will have the biggest impact towards achieving those goals. What are the three biggest goals you want to achieve in the next 3-6 months? Which one is most important to you? How much time and energy are you willing to spend to achieve that goal? What are the next three action steps you must take to start making progress towards that goal? What can you do right now to move forward?
   
   
2. Keep a time log. One of the reasons people don’t achieve their goals is because they feel they don’t have the time. Working towards a goal means making those action steps priorities that you will do each day, no matter what. Often, that means finding other activities you won’t do so you have more time to focus on your goal. A good way to find more time is to track how you are currently spending your time. Get yourself a timer and set it to beep every 20 minutes. As soon as the timer goes off, write down a brief description of the task you are doing in a journal. Do this for a few days until you have a record of your daily activities. At the end of the experiment, examine how you are spending your time. Are your activities directly related to achieving your goals? Where are you wasting time? What activities can you delegate or stop doing to free up time?
   
   
3. Make a daily to-do list. Before you go to sleep each night, spend a few minutes creating a to-do list for the following day. Keep it simple and don’t overwhelm yourself with 20 items you must complete. Rather, focus on the 3-4 most important tasks that must be done to move closer to your goals. Move them to the top of your list and get to work on them as soon as you wake up the next morning. By knocking out your most important tasks first thing in the morning, you start your day off being productive and give yourself a motivational boost to make the day great.
   
   
4. Deal with procrastination. I envy those people who can get to work without thinking, “I can do this later.” Personally, I struggle with procrastination. I want to put things off as long as I can. To cope with procrastination, I’ve started scheduling blocks of uninterrupted time, usually no more than 50-minutes, where I will only work on the most important tasks on my to-do list. Once my 50-minutes are up, I take a break for 10 minutes or so. Then, I come back to work. I also try to start with the “worst” task on my list – the one I am most likely to procrastinate – because I know getting that done will make me feel productive. If I still find myself procrastinating, I journal my reasons for why I need to do this now, what has been holding me back from completing the task, and how I can reward myself when the task is complete. I find that by getting my thoughts down on paper, they aren’t as daunting and I can often poke holes in my logic for procrastinating.
   
   
5. Be organized. How many times have you started to complete a task only to find you can’t find the right paper or realize you need a specific tool you don’t seem to have to move on to the next step? Not being organized leads to procrastination. You can waste a lot of time cleaning up clutter or getting side-tracked if you aren’t organized.
   
   
6. Delegate. One of the best ways to free up time is to delegate tasks. There are plenty of people you can hire to do virtually any task you want completed (check out elance.com for business tasks). If you really don’t want to do something, find someone else that can do it faster or more easily than you can. Yes, sometimes delegating requires an initial investment in time and money to train someone to take over your task, but finding the right person will dramatically help you over the long-term.
   
   
7. Say “no.” If someone asks you to do a particular task, ask yourself how important it is. Will it help you achieve your goals? Is it something you can do quickly? Is it something you want to do? If not, it’s OK to say “no.” Be polite and if possible, suggest someone else who may be able to help.

Being productive means working towards achieving your personal goals. It’s not about what others want from you. It’s about freeing up your time so you can devote more time and energy to the activities and goals you choose. If you want to accomplish something, you have to find a way to make it a priority in your life. Sometimes that means saying “no” or delegating work to others. That’s OK. You can’t please everyone all the time. But you can look out for yourself and make sure you have time to devote to what makes you happy.

1. Choose short, focused periods of uninterrupted time. I do best when I shut off email, disconnect from the internet, and turn off the phone for an hour or so. (I talked about this here.)
2. If it can be done now, do it. If you find something that will take you less than 5 minutes to complete, do it now rather than putting it off until later. It’s always tempting to wait until later to reply to that email or send off that letter or calling that client, but by doing it now, you get it off your plate and don’t need to remember to do it later.
3. Ask yourself “Is this the best use of my time?” I’ve been using this philosophy more as I try to cut back on the number of email newsletter I get, magazines I subscribe to and blogs I read. It’s just not worth the time to continue reading these if they only occasionally offer me something of value. Similarly, there are a number of things I’ve been reading solely for entertainment purposes (and excuses to procrastinate) that really don’t enrich my life. I’ve been working to cut these out as I focuse on more valuable sources.
4. Consolidate and organize. I’m an obsessive information collector, which means I often collect various sources of similar information. Having an organized catalog system in place to tag things and file them away in their appropriate folders helps immensely. As one of my colleagues says, “make sure everything has a home.”
5. Keep an idea journal. I find it’s helpful to keep a journal of all the things I’d like to do, reflections on the day, and anything else I need to jot down during the course of a day. A journal helps me empty my thoughts into a trusted source so I have less to keep track of and am less likely to forget to do.
6. Use technology to your advantage. I use Google Reader to organize the blog feeds I read. I use Basecamp as a project management tool and ToDoist to keep track of daily to do lists. For me, it’s easier to have an electronic version rather than miscellaneous scraps of paper lying around.
7. Schedule down time. Cellphones, email, pagers, Blackberries, and Instant Messenger make it easy for anyone to contact you anytime but you’ll burnout quickly if you don’t schedule time for you and your family.
8. Focus on what makes you happy. Finally, all the productivity tips in the world won’t make you as productive as simply focusing your time and attention on the things you love to do. Focus on your strengths, your skills, your talents, and your expertise, rather than always hoping to improve your weaknesses.

Here is a list of websites participating in the meme. What are your top productivity tips?

One of the first things I’m trying to implement is to only check my email (and feed readers) 2-3 times per day – probably around 11am, 4pm and 8pm -ish. I currently have autocheck on, so it notifies me every time I receive an email. Of course that means I stop what I’m doing to check the message, respond or note on my to-do list what I must do later, and then try to go back to my current task.

In today’s “always on” environment, we feel we need to drop what we’re doing and respond instantly to anyone who wants our attention. In fact, most of us are quite poor at multitasking. Just last month, the New York Times posted an article citing two studies that found multitasking slows us down.

Personally, I don’t need psychological studies to prove that’s the case. Whenever I try to do two things at once, it seems to take longer than if I complete one project than move on to the next. Last week, for instance, I found myself juggling several projects I had started but never finished because something else came up. When deadlines hit, I still had work to do for each.

On Friday, I turned off my phone, shut down my email program and concentrated on completing one major project. As I worked on it, I found myself in that state of “flow” or “optimal performance” you move into when you put all your concentration on one task. It no longer was a nuisance to be completed but an enjoyable experience. And I got the job done in a few hours, whereas if I had split it up, I probably would still be working on it.

If you’ve ever read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book on the topic, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, you’ll recognize the signs – a deep concentration that’s almost effortless because you are completely absorbed into your project and are doing what you do best. That zen state makes work enjoyable, but it’s nearly impossible to get into when our lives are plagued by the distractions of phone and email.

What can you focus on today for an uninterrupted block of time? If you can even focus on a task for 20 minutes, you’ll find you get so much more done and feel far more in control of your time than if you allow yourself to be distracted by others.

During my frantic week, I took some time to reflect why I felt I wasn’t getting anything done. Of course, we all have weeks that border on chaotic, but I realized mine was particularly bad because I fell out of my routine sometime at the beginning of April and my time management abilities seemed to spiral out of control until last week when I was completely out of sync. So, how do you get back on track (or if you don’t have a track, how do you create one)?

The first thing I learned to do to better manage my time was to monitor all my activities over the course of a week. In any given week, there are 168 hours, and since ideally, you’d like to get 8 hours of sleep, that leaves 112 waking hours (or 16 hours/day) to get stuff done, spend time with family and friends, and relax. It seems like plenty of time to do everything we want – until you take a look at where you spend your time.

Over the course of the next week, record your activities hourly – including when you read the paper, check your email, pick the kids up from practice, cook dinner, watch tv, etc. Everything. By the end of the week, you’ll have a good idea of what things to plan for in your weekly schedule.

Then, create a bare-bones weekly schedule or routine that incorporates all your activities. Here’s a basic daily schedule, but feel free to break it out into weekdays to incorporate all your activities.

7:00 – Wake up
7:30-8:15 – Exercise
8:15-9:00 – Shower/Breakfast/Get to work
9:00-9:15 – Create Daily To-Do List
9:15-11:00 – Project Work or Meetings
11:00-12:00 – Check Email/Voicemail, Make Phone Calls
12:00-1:00 – Lunch
1:00-4:00 – Project Work or Meetings
4:00-5:00 – Check Email/Voicemail, Make Phone Calls
5:30-7:00 – Dinner with Family
7:00-10:00 – Family Time, TV or Movies
10:00-11:00 – Get Ready for Bed, Reading/Journaling
11:00 – Lights Out

Of course, you’ll modify your schedule template based on your activities. If you’re writing a novel or blog, schedule an hour or so solely for that. If you have to do something on certain days of the week, create weekly templates to fit in your classes, meetings, and must attend events.

The goal is to create specific time periods so that you can work without interruption when you need to, check email/voicemail at specific times, and still have a life outside of work. Yes, there will always be times when you can’t stick 100% to the schedule, but if you can follow it even 80%, you’ll drastically increase your productivity.