productivity

Setting up goals for yourself properly not only gives you something to strive for, but also a clear path to achievement.  Creating specific, attainable goals for oneself can be a powerful method for transforming your thoughts, ideas, and wishes into actions and tangible results.  

Brian Tracy has said that the act of clearly defining a goal often provides a burst of energy for attaining that goal.   

The Big Picture

We need to be able to process a situation at different levels of interaction for different puposes.  Likewise, our goals often form a hierarchy of levels with different types of goals at each level.  Subgoals make up the different steps and milestones along the way.  For instance, if your goal were to, say, become healthy, some of the subgoals involved in that process might include adjusting your diet, exercising more, and controlling intake of bad stuff.  These subgoals could be broken down further into smaller, more explicit steps, such as steaming your vegetables instead of frying them, purchasing food taking into account nutritional value, jogging in the morning, doing stretches or lifting weights, stopping smoking, drinking less, etc.  

Different factors have to be weighted accordingly and it's usually always to break things down until they are just an ordered list of step by step actions which need ot be carried out in order for success of all your goals.  

It can often be a big help to write these all down.  It has been said that the act of writing out a goal helps to solidify it in your mind, make it more real.  It's like it's harder to lie to yourself about a situation when your own words are staring at you from the paper or something.  

Beyond that, however, it helps to externalize everthing so you can get it off your mind and compare it side by side with everything you've got going on.  

Some tools and Ideas

Goal Sheets - Pages with your goals clearly defined, often broken down into subgoals or actionable items to be performed.  Some people like to rewrite their goals periodically to adjust for life and reiterate the desires to themselves.  

Visualization - Often it can be helpful and enlightening to imagine the outcome of your goals.  This provides a better sense of the definition for success (i.e. what you're really after), as well as inspiration to achieve the goal, and sometimes helps to clarify the steps necessary for implementation.  

Deadline - By providing yourself with a set deadline, you may find yourself with increased desire to push yourself just a little bit harder, and on more long term goals, a main deadline combined with some milestone points can be a terrific tool for measuring your progress toward your desired outcomes.  

Scheduling Tools - Our minds are often random and disorganized, plus we are constantly dealing and interacting with a variety of sources most of every day.  Sometimes it's hard to keep everything straight, and when something's on your mind, but you can't do anything about it right then, it'll drive you crazy.  Proper scheduling and the use of tools to augment your organization abilities can drastically improve your productivity.  Examples of scheduling and organization tools our numerous in our society, including calendars, alarm clocks, tickler files, day-timers, handheld computers, cell phones, and on and on. 

Desire and Perseverence

When it gets right down to it, no matter how clearly defined your goals and the steps to get there are, there are always going to be a lot of challenges to overcome.  From our own laziness and procrastination to the distracting inluences of society, there are a lot of things that can hold you back.  

To achieve any goal, big or little, you have to want it enough to overcome all of the opposing forces of the situation.  Willpower.  

Recommended Media

• Getting Things Done: The art of stress free productivity -- by David Allen
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
• http://www.davidco.com
• http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/08/how-to-set-goals-you-will-actually-achieve/ 

One of the best ways to become Empowered in a general sense is to achieve success in smaller areas of one's life.  There is a certain satisfaction in accomplishing something you set out to do, which can quickly build one's self esteem.  It just feels good to get things done, and often this creates a drive to see what else you can get done--how far you can go.  This snowball effect can create an enormous amount of force in one's life.  

Do Stuff

They say that actions speak louder than words, and this is often true.  It's great to have ideas and discussions, but by actually doing something, you are manifesting your will in the real world.  

Often, we tend to have a kind of action-inertia to overcome in order to be productive.  This can be caused by a number of reasons--apathy (not caring enough to act), procrastination (I'll do it tomorrow), ignorance (not knowing what to do, or not knowing there's something to do in the first place), indecision (not knowing how you want to proceed). 

Feedback

Frequently, we don't realize something important about a situation.  Example:  You've got a piece of spinach in your teeth, and if you don't get some feedback on the matter (glancing in a mirror, being told by a friend, etc.) you'll simply be ignorant of the situation, and thus won't realize there is an action to be taken.  

This principle works at all levels of our lives.  In order to make the best decisions, and take the best actions, one needs to have proper feedback about a situation.  

In a very personal sense, feedback may be achieved by a number of externalization techniques--profiling yourself or creating a character sheet can give you an external source of feedback on yourself.  The trickiest part is in being truly honest with yourself.  By seeing a snapshot of your status as a human, you are more easily able to identify strengths and weaknesses, and thus identify areas to improve, or potential actions you're already qualified for.  

This type of feedback can sometimes be achieved with a close friend (who knows you well), though in this case you're substituting honesty with yourself for honesty from your friend (being filtered by your own perceptions of what your friend's trying to say).  

Another powerful type of feedback you can use to gauge your progress is the creation of goals, and subsequent tests for success.  

Setting Goals

If there is something you want to see done (a goal), more often than not, there are multiple actions (steps) required to achieve success.  A good practice is to clearly define the desired outcome (goal) and then break that down into the steps necessary to actualizing it (sub-goals).  If you break it down all the way, each little step along the way is a very explicit action that can be taken to further your progress toward your goals.  

It's also important to have a method for testing success.  Many people suggest a timeframe for each goal and subgoal.  This is an easy way to test for success and motivate yourself (because you know it's coming). 

Sometimes it's good to have a reward set up for yourself, when you reach the goal, but often the reward can simply be the goal itself (and the wonderful Empowering feeling you get when you succeed).  

"Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry, all things easy."

—Benjamin Franklin

Man must achieve values in order to live. Productiveness is the virtue of achieving values. It is the fullest use of one's mind in seeking and achieving those values. It's primary use is in the creation of wealth. To live, men need physical wealth (meaning food, shelter, etc.) in order to survive. Wealth beyond the minimums is necessary to hedge against the uncertain future. The more wealth created and saved, the better chances one has of survival. Productiveness is the virtue of creating this wealth. It is directly responsible for the forwarding of one's life.

Productiveness in a market economy doesn't mean the direct creation of goods. It means the earning of goods through the creation of value. By trading goods or services, one enables the creation of wealth by others for one's own use. Trading is a kind of productiveness. It is another method of practicing productiveness. The result and aim is the same, though. The creation of wealth.

Productiveness is also applicable in other aspects of ones life. In social relationships, for instance, it is possible to create value. And even outside of material wealth, one can be productive by achieving values. Productiveness then isn't dependent on producing physical goods. It consists of producing values for oneself.

A last note on productivity is that it must be profitable to be called productive. This means the cost of doing something must be less than the value achieved by doing it. In this respect, many acts can be considered non-productive after the fact. Mere profitability, or the gaining from an act, is not sufficient for productivity, though. The virtue of productivity means achieving the most one can achieve. Working at a fast-food restaurant is not productive if one has the ability and opportunity to be a brain-surgeon. Spending ones resources (time and effort) on a lesser value when one could achieve a higher value is not productive.

—http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Ethics_Productiveness.html