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.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31NJP6SXYEL._AA280_.jpg

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

Getting into the zone is a very personal thing - some people do it in groups, some alone. Some like music, some like physical activity. It's really hard to say. As a programmer, I know my zone, and I know when I'm in it - but that doesn't always mean I can forcefully put myself into it, ya know?

I wrote something to my coworkers a few months ago on the subject, so below I'm blatantly quoting myself. Hope that's allowed:
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And then, back at my desk, there's the music. I have my playlist up. I call it "Heavy." Right now it's play "Dragula" by Rob Zombie, but it could just as easily be playing anything from Evanescence, Nirvana, Saliva, Drowning Pool....you get the idea. The real pounding stuff. Headphones on, volume up just enough where it drowns out everything around me but not so loud I'm blowing my ear drums.

And then there's the rocking. I can always tell when I'm in my own personal zone because I sort of rock back and forth while I think/work. It goes back a long time ago to a college professor, Lee Becker, who made a passing comment in class when he'd asked us to work out some code in our heads. He said, "I found it helps if you rock back and forth a bit." He's right.

Well, put on the "heavy" playlist and that rocking back and forth becomes full-force, full-body, how-can-I-even-read-the-screen, keep-your-hands-on-the-keyboard-and-stop-playing-air-drums, oh-my-god-he's-going-to-break-something spasms, for lack of a more descriptive phrase :). This is something I only do in my corner cube (I wonder what the guy across from me thinks?) and you can tell directly how involved I am in the code I'm writing by how wildly the rest of my body is moving.

I actually quite enjoy it. It's like taking that infinite source of energy we all discover in that zone, distilling down into two parts -- the mental stuff goes into the code, and the rest turns kinetic and pours out through the rest of your body.

I also realize what it is, for me, all of those things. It's all ways to rule out everything between myself and my code. The headphones rule out sound distractions. The body rocking is an outlet for energy but it's also "I've turned off that part of my brain that cares what I look like". Taking the laptop to meetings sayings "This is still my time. You can only have the minimum amount of my attention you need, and I decide how much that is. I have no obligations to you people, only to myself and to my project." Even typing while walking says "Get out of my way, I'm not looking at you."

It's like a new universe comes into existence, and that universe consists of my brain, and my software. I climb inside, and I'll come out when I'm done, thank you very much. I may remember to eat.

I find beginning the day with well thought out routines to get the necessary grooming, getting out the door, and chores done is a great start. This started when I was NOT a morning person, but had to be at work and smiling by 6:00 a.m. I developed a routine to get up at 5:30 and out the door by 5:50 (then a 5 minute walk to work, time to pour coffee). Then, it was a strategy to get to work on time while recognizing I wasn't at my peak mentally. But it fostered a feeling of efficiency (not to mention confidence that I had all my clothes on!), which is a great way to start the day. I've kept this routine for the 3 days I have to leave the house at 5:00 a.m., but on the 4 days I have a more leisurely start to the day, the routine gets me through the basics of tidying up the house and workspace now and lasts an hour or so. I find myself at the start of business with almost everything "ready to go" and a hot cup of coffee in my hand - a good start. I try to improve and evolve the routine items every day.

Next, I try not to stay at one task for too long. I've gone so far as to set a timer to force me to get up and do something else, even if it's trivial. I'll go back to the original task, but often I've succeeded at getting some other task completed. Besides accomplishing something, it increases that feeling of efficiency and motivates me to the more challenging work.

I find that checking in with colleagues early in the day helps me to keep the work on my desk in perspective with the rest of the organization. Talking about the work ahead sometimes gives me ideas that I almost immediately take back to my desk to incorporate. Usually, I'll look up after tuning up my project and find several hours have gone by.

• Things that tank my productivity:
  the endless checking of email, for one. I'm still working out how best to deal with that.
  Meetings for the sake of meetings. Ugh.
  Failing to eat regularly or eating junk food (usually served at meetings). The blood sugar sags and spikes can really mess up my productivity.

I find putting on headphones helps when too many people feel the need to chat stop by and chat too often. Sometimes I'm not listening to anything, but most people won't bother me when they're on!

I equate being "in the zone" to being in the hypnotic state. There are many theories on what hypnosis actually is, but one example of hypnosis is a highly focused state.

Many people will suggest ways of getting into that state, and there are some great ways to do so, but I'll suggest something else...

We naturally go into "the zone" (the hypnotic state) every 25-30 minutes. When you "zone out", you're in that state. Learn where you are in that cycle and use it to your full advantage. There is a time for being active and a time for being relaxed (where creativity comes from).

After eating, your blood is going to digestion, so I've found that I can't be too mentally productive after eating.

Gnothe Seuton..

Well, after you work at a preschool for 3.5 years it is an easy task, because you are so used to blocking out those kids all day long :) But, one good way to do this is to listen to music, this will normally block out your other distractions allow for focus on one goal

First, I have to have a list. If I don't write everything down, I spend more time thinking about what I have to do than doing anything.

In the afternoon, when my brain slows down and looks for distraction, I'll put some music on my iPod. That takes away some of the restlessness and lets my focus.

The best way by far is meditation

I'm a freelance walkthrough writer for Mahalo, and the basics of how I get into my "zone" are actually quite simple.

First, you need caffeine. Loads of it. I have to stay up late to get these walkthroughs written, because I'm at school from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., and since I tutor there I'm liable to not start working until after 8 p.m. That means that I've got a choice between writing the walkthrough for the next few hours and trying to sleep a bit, sleeping the entire time, and writing the entire time - I usually opt for the last one.

Next, I need music - tons of it, of different genres, but usually something upbeat, with a decent tempo of 110 or higher. Coheed & Cambria are a personal favourite, along with Incubus, The Flashbulb, and Stone Temple Pilots. My playlist for writing consists of around 7,000 songs from different artists, and I never use headphones - it's a constriction.

The keyboard must be in a comfortable position that, no matter how I'm sitting, can be reached. A comfortable chair and ergonomically designed mouse are also helpful - I spent a little more on those three things than most people thought was necessary, but I haven't regretted it once.

Always keep your favourite snack food at hand, in large quantities - drinking Mountain Dew by the gallons requires some sort of tasty snack to munch while I'm thinking about the best way to word the amazing technique of defeating the third level's boss, or the easiest way to describe the path to get to the Alchemilla Hospital in Silent Hill.

Light - lots of it, of various types. This is more to keep your eyes from being burned out on the monitor than anything else - I'm a night owl, obviously, but staring at an LCD screen for hours in a poorly lit room causes my eyes to water. I also have a large monitor. If you are typing late, and you're in the "zone", use a spell-checker to make sure that what you just typed was "go left from the East entrance" and not "glet fromm the eest ent."

It's entirely subjective, of course, but when you've always got insomnia(like me), who's writing late at night, these steps are my personal Gold standard.

Being and staying productive requires several things for me:
1. A good breakfast.  Most days I eat 3 scrambled eggs with toast, washed down with a glass of cold milk.
2. Adequate sleep.  I get 9 hours a night.
3. I chew gum while I work.
4. I use noise cancelling headphones