From HBR, 2 articles, about goals and motivation

https://hbr.org/2014/12/align-your-time-management-with-your-goals
At the end of a busy day, sometimes it’s hard to figure out where the time went. The following excerpt from the book Getting Work Done provides a simple process for you to prioritize your work and understand how you’re actually using your time.

What goals are you aiming for in your work? Does the way that you are spending your time actually correlate to those goals? Without answers to these questions, you won’t know how the many tasks on your list should be prioritized, organized, and ultimately accomplished.

List your goals

Ideally, you and your manager should meet at the start of each year to formulate a set of performance goals. From your discussion, you should understand how those goals tie into the company’s aims and mission. You likely also have your own personal career goals. Together, these may look something like, “Improve people-management skills. Manage six new products. Handle contracts for all of the department’s new products. Develop vendor-management skills.”

Revisiting them now, write these goals down—on paper or in a note-taking app if you prefer. You will use these goals in two ways: first, to prioritize your daily work; and second, to gauge your progress (in other words, to benchmark what you’re accomplishing and whether the changes you make as a result of this book are effective for you). By referring back to this list regularly, you’ll be able to identify which tasks are most important for you to tackle so you can plan accordingly.

Track your time

Once you’ve identified your goals, it’s time to examine how you’re currently spending your time. Are you working on the things you should be doing—the things that will allow you to reach those goals—or are you getting bogged down by unrelated tasks or unexpected crises?

In order to truly understand where you are spending your time and to identify whether you should adjust your workload, track your work for two weeks by completing the following exercise. You may discover that your results don’t align with your goals. The point is to uncover where that misalignment occurs so you can correct it.

First, write down your activities. Consider this a brain dump, and leave no stone unturned. List all of the tasks you perform, meetings you attend, and even the time you spend socializing or procrastinating at work. It can help to look back over your calendar for the last week or two to get a sense of your range of activities. Once you have a full list, break it down into broad categories so you can track the amount of time you spend doing tasks in each category. Some categories to consider include:

Core responsibilities: day-to-day tasks that make up the crux of your job.Personal growth: activities and projects that you find meaningful and valuable, but may not be part of your everyday responsibilities.Managing people: your work with others, including direct reports, colleagues, and even your superiors.Crises and fires: interruptions and urgent matters that arise occasionally and unexpectedly.Free time: lunch breaks and time spent writing personal e-mails, browsing the web, or checking social media.Administrative tasks: necessary tasks that you perform each day, such as approving time sheets or invoices, or putting together expense reports.

Seeing your work broken into categories like this will help you visualize how you’re really spending your time, and you may already be getting a sense of whether this lines up with the goals you identified.

rresponding categories.

At this point, you may be thinking, I’m busy; I don’t have time to log everything I do. It’s true: This system does require an up-front investment of time and effort.

But logging your tasks and how long it takes to complete them will let you clearly see where you’re spending too much time and where you need to begin to reallocate time to achieve your goals. If you want to improve your people management skills, for example, you may realize that devoting 10 hours a week is not enough; perhaps you need to offload some administrative tasks so you have the additional time you need for that goal. By making small, deliberate shifts in how you spend your day, you’ll ensure that you’re investing the right amount of time on the tasks that matter most, making you more efficient at achieving your goals.

This post is adapted from the Harvard Business Review Press book 20-Minute Manager: Getting Work Done.

https://hbr.org/2014/11/what-maslows-hierarchy-wont-tell-you-about-motivation
Autonomy is people’s need to perceive that they have choices, that what they are doing is of their own volition, and that they are the source of their own actions. The way leaders frame information and situations either promotes the likelihood that a person will perceive autonomy or undermines it. To promote autonomy:

Frame goals and timelines as essential information to assure a person’s success, rather than as dictates or ways to hold people accountable.Refrain from incentivizing people through competitions and games. Few people have learned the skill of shifting the reason why they’re competing from an external one (winning a prize or gaining status) to a higher-quality one (an opportunity to fulfill a meaningful goal).Don’t apply pressure to perform. Sustained peak performance is a result of people acting because they choose to — not because they feel they haveto.

Relatedness is people’s need to care about and be cared about by others, to feel connected to others without concerns about ulterior motives, and to feel that they are contributing to something greater than themselves. Leaders have a great opportunity to help people derive meaning from their work. To deepen relatedness:

Validate the exploration of feelings in the workplace. Be willing to ask people how they feel about an assigned project or goal and listen to their response. All behavior may not be acceptable, but all feelings are worth exploring.Take time to facilitate the development of people’s values at work — then help them align those values with their goals. It is impossible to link work to values if individuals don’t know what their values are.Connect people’s work to a noble purpose.

Competence is people’s need to feel effective at meeting every-day challenges and opportunities, demonstrating skill over time, and feeling a sense of growth and flourishing. Leaders can rekindle people’s desire to grow and learn. To develop people’s competence:

Make resources available for learning. What message does it send about values for learning and developing competence when training budgets are the first casualty of economic cutbacks?Set learning goals — not just the traditional results-oriented and outcome goals.At the end of each day, instead of asking, “What did you achieve today?” ask “What did you learn today? How did you grow today in ways that will help you and others tomorrow?”

Unlike Maslow’s needs, these three basic needs are not hierarchical or sequential. They are foundational to all human beings and our ability to flourish.

The exciting message to leaders is that when the three basic psychological needs are satisfied in the workplace, people experience the day-to-day high-quality motivation that fuels employee work passion — and all the inherent benefits that come from actively engaged individuals at work. To take advantage of the science requires shifting your leadership focus from, “What can I give people to motivate them?” to “How can I facilitate people’s satisfaction of autonomy, relatedness, and competence?”

Leaders have opportunities every day to integrate these motivational practices. For example, a leader I coach was about to launch a company-wide message to announce mandatory training on green solutions compliance. Ironically, his well-intentioned message dictated people’s actions — undermining people’s sense of autonomy and probably guaranteeing their defiance rather than compliance. His message didn’t provide a values-based rationale or ask individuals to consider how their own values might be aligned to the initiative. After reconsidering his approach, he created this message embedded with ways for people to experience autonomy, relatedness, and competence: