An old video, but very good introduction on creativity. John is a lot more than an amazing actor, his knowledge is quite impressive. I highly recommend watching the entire 37 minute video twice over a two week period.
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Goals give meaning to your life, and are a defining factor for success. They keep you motivated and on-track, providing self-confidence and purpose. Without goals, life tends to just pass you by. While most people are at least aware of the importance of goal-setting, few make the effort to clearly define and spell them out. Fewer still know how to set goals effectively.
Goals should be realistic and specific. Aiming for intangibles like “happiness,” “success,” or “being rich” does nothing to guide you. Rather, you need to figure out precisely what it will take to feel like you’ve reached such notions. Brainstorm what these factors might be. When you hit on the right ones, write them down. Goals should be accompanied by a clear and detailed timeline.
When transcribing your goals, phrase them positively. Avoid setting goals that stress what you don’t want or that emphasize negativity in any way. Base goals on your actions, as opposed to results, whenever possible. For example, a student might aim to prepare for a test for a certain amount of time, rather than define the goal as an A on the test. In this way, meeting the goal is entirely in that student’s hands (allowing, for example, that grading can be subjective). Failure to meet a goal can be extremely demotivating.
Start by defining the most long-term goals. These typically relate to education, career, finances, family, health, and personal matters like artistic or other interests. Outline what will be required to meet these goals in order to obtain shorter-term goals. Follow this process to devise even immediate goals.
Once you have goals spelled out, prioritize them. Staring at the plan for your life can easily feel overwhelming and may conjure a fear of failure or even of success. By breaking goals down into small, achievable tasks, and understanding that they won’t all be placing demands on you at all times, your goals won’t seem so daunting. You may also feel overwhelmed by the idea of mapping out your life. Remind yourself that nothing is definitive. Goals are used to provide direction. However, it’s not uncommon for goals and priorities to change over time.
Don’t succumb to pressures that prevent you from setting goals. Fears and doubt are normal, but they should not be used as excuses for failing to give your life direction. Take the time, and never confuse being busy with accomplishing meaningful work. While the process of effective goal setting may be stressful, ultimately the perception of powerlessness over your life is a much more profound source of stress. You do have the ability to control your life, and setting clear short and long-term goals is the key.
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Some years ago, a friend and I took a trip together, meeting up with a few other old friends at a lake house. On the morning of departure, I went to pick Mark up and we loaded his bags into the trunk with mine. We were ready to go. Or so I thought.
“I’ve got the directions, but I think we should have an alternate route mapped out, just in case,” Mark said as I slumped down onto his couch.
Twenty minutes passed. I inquired about the hold-up. Mark stumbled into the room, clumsily carrying a stack of paper, maps and guidebooks. “Well, I think I’ve found a shortcut. It should shave off an hour.” I watched him quizzically as he dropped to the ground and spread them all out around him. Like a mad scientist, he flipped through pages and scribbled notations. Before I knew it, more than another hour had passed.
Continue reading If Versus When: A Distinction for Productivity
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Christmas is conspiring to take over the world.
I remember fondly those days when you walked into any retail outlet or cafe on a cold mid-December day and were greeted by the cheery sounds of Christmas music wafting from the store’s speakers. Yes, this is still the case. But today, you can step into a business establishment and hear the holiday serenades in November. And I’m not talking late November, either.
Continue reading When Tasks Consume All the Time You Allot Them
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Many people drift through life, taking what comes their way, coping with problems that arise as best they can with what they have. Their lives are left more to circumstance than to their own aims and desires. In fact, the Harvard Business School released a study that classified 3 percent of people as successful, 30 percent of people as somewhat successful, and the other two-thirds as simply watching life pass them by. What’s missing for most are goals.
Sure, people figure out how to pay their mortgage and bills each month, but to truly take life into your own hands, you need long-term goals for all aspects of your life that transcend the basic necessities.
Continue reading Top 3% of successful people
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Procrastination–the habitual delaying of what must or should be done–is often treated lightly, even joked about. The ramifications, however, can be serious. School or work deadlines are missed, opportunities are lost, and the resulting stress can take a toll on health. Procrastination may also be a symptom of an underlying mental health concern such as depression or attention-deficit disorder (ADD). Ultimately, when procrastination becomes a routine, it is one of the greatest roadblocks to success.
Most people put off unpleasant tasks occasionally, but true procrastinators find the struggle to get down to business affects a wide range of life’s tasks on an ongoing basis, even routine responsibilities, such as paying bills or cleaning the house. Twenty percent of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators, according to a report in Psychology Today. Moreover, while the types of people who procrastinate are varied and from all walks of life, the problem has similar roots, effects, and behaviors at its most fundamental level.
Continue Reading Psychology and Behaviors of Procrastination
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Productivity depends on time management skills, or effectively optimizing how you spend the hours of your day to accomplish as much as possible. While a hectic schedule and seemingly endless lists of responsibilities (not to mention the things you want to do) are often daunting and stressful, learning to organize your life according to the fundamentals of time management makes everything easier.
The driving force of time management is the goals you set for yourself. The desire to achieve them provides the motivation to carry out schedules, meet demands, push through the impulse to procrastinate, and make sacrifices for effective time management. Goals need to be realistic and well defined, and you need to understand exactly what it takes to realize them.
Your goals are also what enable you to prioritize how you spend your time. How important is each task to achieving one or more of your goals? How much time will it take to do it properly? How much time will it take away from other tasks that further your objectives? When you look at what you devote your time to in this light, it often becomes immediately clear where you’re wasting too much time and where you’re not spending enough.
Continue reading Fundamentals of Effective Time Management
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To maximize productivity, you must minimize wasted time. This requires focus. While productivity largely comes from motivation and will power, there are steps you can take to keep yourself on track and enable yourself to work through the times when drive is elusive.
Productivity is simply how efficiently you’re moving toward reaching a goal, which makes setting well-defined goals essential. Create an outline that takes you to your goal, and devise a timeline for completion of each task along the way. Review everything you’ve been planning to do, and put aside tasks that are unimportant or unrelated to immediate goals.
Continue reading Keeping Focused to Increase Productivity
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Of all the resources at your disposal, you have the least control over time. And time is just that–a resource–and the most important part of successful time management is learning to regard it as such. Consider that if you spend 10 hours a day on basic needs like sleeping, showering, and eating, you have 98 hours in a week to accomplish everything else you have to do. Productivity, and ultimately success, depends on your ability to use time wisely, fulfilling obligations and personal desires.
When demands on your time pile up, it becomes overwhelming and stressful. To manage your time, organization is crucial. With the ability to create realistic schedules that meet your needs, your productivity rises while stress levels decrease. Of course, it’s unrealistic to expect every week’s schedule to run precisely. Life brings the unexpected. But overall, your schedule will be your map to success.
So how do you shape life’s chaos into a manageable schedule?
Continue reading Schedule for Successful Time Management
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It is natural to avoid work and obligations occasionally, but when procrastination interferes with productivity and hinders success, efforts must be made to overcome this detrimental habit. Procrastination is a habit; it is learned and practiced repeatedly, becoming ingrained over time. Like any other habit, it can be broken, but it requires decisiveness, diligence, and will power.
You must learn to recognize procrastination in order to overcome it. If you are filling your time with unimportant tasks, checking email over and over again, repeatedly skipping a particular item on your to-do list, taking on additional tasks that prevent you from doing something, sitting down to work then immediately getting up to tend to something else, or making excuses for putting something off, you are procrastinating.
Continue reading Overcome Procrastination
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