Successful people share 11 ways to make 2017 your most productive year yet by Business Insider and Shana Lebowitz on Jan 2, 2016, 6:01 PM Advertisement
 If you pay close attention to Business Insider's Strategy vertical, you'll notice we frequently share productivity tips from an expert we've just interviewed, a book we've just read, or new research we've just scoured. And we admit it can be a little daunting to keep up with all the advice out there. So since you're here to learn how to make better use of your time, we thought we'd save you some and round up the best productivity tricks. To do this, we asked some of the experts we trust to share how they get it all done. Here's their favorite productivity advice: SEE ALSO: 18 bad habits you should break in 2017 to be more productive DON'T MISS: 11 TED talks that can help you become insanely productive Associate something you love with something you want to accomplish.  "Pick a ritual that you love — for me this ritual is the morning coffee — and connect it to a productivity-related activity. In my case, it has to do with writing. "So I connect something I love, which is the coffee ritual, to something else that I love in principle, but not every moment of it, which is writing. It's an almost conditioned response, where I start working and I'm enjoying the coffee and the writing at the same time." — Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke and author of "Payoff"
Be more compassionate.  "My top productivity tip? Compassion. Wait, what? Aren't productivity tips typically about shifting mindset, single tasking, deep focus, working in pulses, and a host of other useful tools? Yes. And all those tools can help us be fantastically productive, effective, and even more creative. "But what compassion recognizes is that we're human. We're going to have stupid days, when nothing seems to go right. We just will. There will be times when we're going to be distracted, unmotivated, scattered, when some crisis at work or in life kept us up all night, or when we're feeling just plain overwhelmed. "But rather than beat ourselves up, sink into paralyzing negativity, or ruminate endlessly on what went wrong or how we failed, compassion enables us to forgive ourselves, to learn what we can, to see that it's all about practicing, to let go of perfection, and — lightly and with grace — move forward and try again." — Brigid Schulte, author of "Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time" and director of the Good Life Initiative/Better Life Lab at New America
Make accomplishing your task a necessity.  "A key to maximizing productivity is to forget about what you already know — or think you know — about motivation. We typically assume that there's a direct correlation between how much we want to achieve a given outcome and how likely we are to actually achieve it. "However, there's a much more constructive way to think about motivation — that's to think of it as something you must custom manufacture for each and every goal you wish to achieve. By custom manufacture, I mean to deliberately and creatively put yourself in situations that make you urgently feel like it's necessary. "Here's my favorite example: After failing time and time again to stick with his good intention to exercise daily, Joe custom manufactured a situation that changed everything. He simply agreed to, from now on, own only one stick of underarm deodorant and keep that one stick of deodorant in his locker at the gym. So the only way he could spare himself from the mortifying embarrassment of stinking all day was to go to the gym. Once he was there, he would feel too foolish about just using his deodorant and leaving, so he would stay and exercise. Joe essentially tricked himself into doing what he intended to do, and eventually exercising daily became a self-sustaining habit." — Steve Levinson, clinical psychologist and author of "The Power to Get Things Done"
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