When Joe Zack (of Coding Blocks podcast) reflected upon a list of New Year's Resolutions very thoughtfully planned out and realized he had accomplished nothing throughout the year, he realized he didn't care about the goal but was rather looking forward to the notches in his belt. Yes, life gets in the way, but Joe now understands that a goal means nothing if you don't have your heart in it.

As a software architect, David Walker looks for the "story" behind the software: what do the users need, how will they interact with technology and what will it help them accomplish. After being highly productive at work, David looks for ways to enhance productivity outside of work by taking the lessons learned from software development and applying them to everyday problems.

When an organization was struggling with a lack of productivity and $2 million into a $5 million project with nothing to show, Frank Fuglestad was brought in as a consultant to set things right. He discovered that outsourcing the project sent a message to the internal employees that they did not have the expertise to get the job done and were expendable. By moving the work internally and resetting expectations, the organization delivered the project in half the budget and tremendously improved morale.

Working really, really hard and not getting anywhere... sound familiar? As a software development manager, Edward Fry struggled with rapidly changing business needs that resulted in meeting overload. Too much time in meetings meant that his day-to-day programming tasks were not getting finished. After stepping back and looking at the situation, he discovered that he could take control of the situation by managing the flood of meetings and emails.

In an intern position, Alan was faced with an uninspiring role and a deadline that extended many years past his internship. After fighting procrastination and low levels of productivity throughout the internship, Alan realized he needed to find roles which aligned to his level of interest and social needs.

Assigned to a team that was over staffed, under utilized and without clear direction, Jeff and his peers struggled with productivity on a $1 million project. Things turned around when he decomposed the 100 page requirements document into a list of measurable tasks and reduced the team size. Jeff convinced the stakeholders to trim the project from 25 different people across many roles to 4 team members: two full stack software developers, one data analyst and one business analyst / subject matter exp