When we think of creativity, we think about people with “creative” professions like painters, writers, composers or designers. But in reality, creativity is not a skill, reserved to a small group of people. It is our inborn right to be creative, to use our imagination and to invent and re-invent our life!

1. Patience.

2. Focus.

3. Flow.

Time management is a great theory. It helps us to get more organized, to set priorities, and to increase our productivity. Except for when it does not work…

1. Establish your “flow” times.

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We live in a society built on efficiency and productivity. We stay busy, invent new time management strategies, and learn how to fill every second with some kind of activity so that we can “save” more time and fill it up with even more activities. But the question is – What’s the point?

1. “What you are doing does not matter so much as what you are learning from doing it.” - Egyptian Proverb

2. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

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Contrary to popular belief, effective time management is not based on doing more things in less time. That’s just not going to happen. Time management is about doing the right things better. That’s why first and most important skill you need to learn is to correctly identify tasks that require your full and complete attention from little tasks that can wait. Before planning your daily routine and choosing what needs to be done on that particular day, ask yourself two questions:

Question #1: Is it what I need to be doing today?

Question #2: Do I want to do it?

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We all want so many things at the same time: a beautiful house, a nice car, lost of money, loving relationships, successful career… and so on. Unfortunately any worthwhile, challenging goal requires sustained effort.

And that’s where things get difficult.

Doing something for a day or two isn’t hard. Starting something new is always very exciting. But after a couple of days when a project stops being new, the excitement slowly fades. As a result we move on to a new goal, never finishing what we’ve already started.

This pattern of behavior slowly transforms itself into a habit. And we end up with nothing… Except for stress.

Not only that.. In the process of chasing after our multiple desires we lose energy, time and money.

There are two main qualities that you need to develop if you want to be successful:

Focus and consistency.

If you want to have a life of your dreams, you should realize, that you can achieve ANYTHING you desire, but you can’t achieve EVERYTHING at the same time.

As we live in a must-have-it-now society we are accustomed to switching from one goal to another with a speed of light. However, our time, energy, effort and money are all limited resources. When we divide those limited resources between our multiple wishes, desires and goals, we simply can’t accomplish any significant results.

What we are left with is hardly enough to create a momentum. So our motivation begins to wane, because we don’t see how we can ever reach our goal.

Big long-term goals require 100% of your focused energy. You can achieve any goal a lot faster, given that you stay focused on it.

You might have dozens of projects and goals in mind, but only a few of them will have a noticeable positive effect on your life.

When you begin to think in terms of priorities, things will start to fall into place and your focus and productivity will increase instantly.

Prioritizing is easy. All you have to do is to compare two goals in mind and chose one that is most important to you at the moment. Your present life and well-being is a result of choices that you make EVERY single second. Please, choose wisely!

Because if you keep on doing what you have always done, you keep on getting what you’ve always gotten.

If you want to find out 3 great techniques that will help you to achieve razor-like focus watch the next video.

Do you know what the easiest way to destroy any remaining shreds of motivation at the very beginning of the day is? Take your to-do list (if you have one), choose the most urgent, unpleasant and time-consuming task and start imagining yourself doing it. You will see that even if you have not started actually working on it, you already feel tired, and your determination disappears with the speed of light.

I am sure that you know the feeling…

You can plan and schedule. You can leave yourself reminders and put it on your priority list. You can make promises and resolutions. You can organize and reorganize. You can guilt trip yourself and try to artificially boost your motivation. But the bottom line is – it does not work!

Procrastination still remains a flaw most of us put off curing.

And it is not that we are irresponsible or slothful people. On the contrary, we rarely sit around and do nothing. We do plenty of marginally useful but very urgent tasks during the day (like sharpening our pencils, checking our mail box, organizing a messy desk, or getting ourselves a cup of coffee).

Any one of us can be easily motivated to do timely and challenging tasks, as long as those tasks provide us with an excuse not to do something more important. And if we have set our mind on sharpening those pencils, no force on the earth can stop us from doing it!

The more time passes, the closer the deadline looms, the more we are plagued by guilt, the more we become motivated to do other useful, but superficially less important things.

On the other hand, there is a small group of people that seems to complete everything on time and demonstrate the miracle of effectiveness.

How do they do it?

The latest research showed that the way we mentally approach a certain task will largely determine how quickly we will complete it.

When approaching any task, we can use either abstract or concrete thinking. Abstract thinking perceives a task as whole. It puts a mental distance between a person and the goal, making it seem hard to reach. This is why the more we think about doing something that we deem difficult, the less the chances are that we will actually get to it.

Concrete thinking is breaking down a challenging task into smaller, more manageable parts making our goal seem much easier to accomplish.

I call it “lumping” vs. “chunking”. You can either perceive the task as a ‘lump’ that cannot be subdivided and digested or you can break it down into smaller “chunks” that seem more realistic and can be dealt with systematically.

The teenager who wants to go out with his friends, will most likely view writing a paper on the economic factors involved in World War II as an ugly massive single-lump task and do everything in his power to postpone it for later.

Another great way to prevent ourselves from using abstract thinking is to focus on a small percentage of the task that needs to get done. Before getting to any task that seems difficult and timely, promise yourself that you will only complete 30% of it (or spend 45 minutes doing it). Give yourself permission to stop when you said you would, if you do not feel like working on it any longer.

What this technique does, is give you the right to procrastinate, without any feelings of remorse and regret, while still getting some of the work done.

You may feel that overcoming procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception. And you are absolutely right! It does! Only this time your self-deceptive skills will work to your advantage. Don’t you just love it when you can use one of your flaws to actually improve your character and become a more productive person?