What are some ways to become and stay highly productive?

Motivation is an incredibly hard thing to quantify and conjure when needed. The problem is that motivation is different for everyone at different times.

Personally, here are the things that I find help:

1)
I lead a simple personal life.  I have a nice family, a small house and friends I care about.  Most of the time, my personal life is reliably nice and I strive to maintain that consistency.

2)
For the most part, I know myself.  I know what I need to be happy.From a less personal perspective, these things contribute to my productivity:

3)
I need to control the space I'm in.  It sounds odd, but I am most productive when I can control things like the lighting, the temperature, noise, and the people who enter my space.

4)
I have natural light lamps.  Even in the summer where I live, natural light is sometimes hard to come by and using a couple of these lamps to deliniate between high and low productivity times really helps me.

Many natural light products are marketed to people who have been diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.).  These lights however, have been proven to adjust moods and solve sleep problems for everyone. 

This desktop, natural panel light from Amazon is portable and easy to position for comfortable, healthy light.

As a bonus, I find that using this light to combat Jetlag when I return home from a trip significantly reduces the amount of time I feel out of sync!

5)
There is a natural rhythm to productivity and listening to yourself to know when those times are is very important.  No one is productive from 9 until 5pm.  Being aware of the queues you feel and acting on them dramatically increases productivity.

6)
Music and ambient noise can queue productivity.  Personally I am usually the most productive between 6am and 11pm.  I play energetic music that I like and "bust out the work" to get things done.

Other times of the day, I'll play low key music and contrast it with bits of high energy music from the morning when the waves of productivity come in.

CONCLUSION
You can't be told to be productive.  You need to listen to yourself and learn how to use the queues that inject productivity into your day.

Using things such as music, environment, lighting, etc can help when combined with a clear and quiet mental state

Posted via web from Rob Brown