“People have become a slave to technology such that they allow it to control their awareness. As soon as a notification beeps, one reaches out to check it. If you practice this kind of a behaviour all day, you are just practising distraction."

Scenario: Okay let me focus on my work...The next moment beep beep!Huh? Alright first let me check my notification...Woah...A new follow request on my insta..let me check!And then you are totally off from your actual work.Action plan: TURN ON THE DO NOT DISTURB MODE OR BETTER SWITCH OFF YOUR PHONE WHILE YOU ARE DOING YOUR FULL FOCUS WORK.

Turn Off All The Notifications Of Your Phone! Will Ya?

Do you know that multitasking reduces your productivity up to 40%So focus on one task at a time. So that means no texting and doing your homework simultaneously!

NO MULTITASKING!

Your posture sends a signal to your brain as to how active or lazy you feel.So sit back straight while doing your work.A good posture creates an active mind and an active mind creates a productive YOU!

SIT BACK STRAIGHT! NO SLUGGISH POSITION.

Yup, just a morning exercise is not enough!Take 5 minutes of walking or stretching breaks in between your work.Sitting for long hours can lead to back pain which is not healthy.

EXERCISE AND GET MOVING

When you are working on something, instead of focusing on the hours put in, focus on what you want to get done.Get it?

FOCUS ON YOUR GOAL NOT ON THE HOURS

Books with better structures encourage us to think in sequence — the more we read, the more our brains are able to link cause and effect.You’ll be surprised at how much focused you get. Losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation.

MEDITATE! 

Remember you master what you practice. Why are we so good at distraction? It's because we "practice distraction." So take these small action plans today and let's break this habit of distraction together!

The human attention span has been never been so low. A study conducted by Microsoft in 2015 suggests that the average human has an 8-seconds attention span. The number has shrunk over the years due…

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

health

Health

problemsolving

Problem Solving

timemanagement

Time Management

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

7 Proven Ways to Develop Razor-Sharp Focus

Forming a new habit can be challenging because it’s easier to go back to what you’re comfortable with. Your ability to be consistent requires self-control, which means you don’t allow yourself to get off track while staying focused on incremental improvement. This will help you develop the discipline required to keep going.

1. Develops discipline and self-control

The level of trust you have with yourself shows up in the level of trust others have with you. Being consistent will help build momentum. This means you’ll also feel good about what you’re working towards.

2. Builds a higher level of trust

Consistency will lead to progress , which can speed up the achievement of what you want. This will build your self-confidence, which will help you set bigger and more challenging goals.

3. ast track your improvement

Your results will reveal if you’re consistent or not. If you know you’re not on track, you can hold yourself accountable . This means you can adjust your actions or behaviours and keep progressing towards what you want.

4. reate accountability

Small actions carried out repeatedly will amount to big results over time. When you do something for a long period, you will differentiate yourself from those who aren’t consistent. This can help you attract new opportunities that may not have been possible if you hadn’t been consistent.

5. elp you stand out or be noticed.

When you know why consistency is an important habit to have, you can use it to your advantage.

habits

Habits

5 Reasons Why Consistency is an Important Habit 

I am not a sponsor but this app is amazing! Not too intrusive but helps you build new habits with friendly reminders & lovely, inspiring quotes to start off your day! Helps with my anxiety somehow as well! ✨🌟"Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars."🌟✨- Martin Luther King, Jr.💖

HELP YOURSELF CREATE NEW, GOOD HABITS! - Give This App A Try

Helps my anxiety & depression during differing struggles.

productivity

Productivity

A Wellness Game
To Find Balance

Medieval monks had a terrible time concentrating. And concentration was their lifelong work! Their tech was obviously different from ours. But their anxiety about distraction was not. They complained about being overloaded with information, and about how, even once you finally settled on something to read, it was easy to get bored and turn to something else. They were frustrated by their desire to stare out of the window, or to constantly check on the time (in their case, with the Sun as their clock), or to think about food or sex when they were supposed to be thinking about God.

Concentration

They even worried about getting distracted in their dreams. Sometimes they accused demons of making their minds wander. Sometimes they blamed the body’s base instincts. But the mind was the root problem: it is an inherently jumpy thing. John Cassian, whose thoughts about thinking influenced centuries of monks, knew this problem all too well. He complained that the mind ‘seems driven by random incursions’. It ‘wanders around like it were drunk’. It would think about something else while it prayed and sang.

Demons

It would meander into its future plans or past regrets in the middle of its reading. It couldn’t even stay focused on its own entertainment – let alone the difficult ideas that called for serious concentration. That was in the late 420s. If John Cassian had seen a smartphone, he’d have forecast our cognitive crisis in a heartbeat.

John Cassian

But, instead, his mind lay elsewhere. Cassian was writing at a time when Christian monastic communities were beginning to boom in Europe and the Mediterranean. A century earlier, ascetics had mostly lived in isolation. And the new enthusiasm for communal enterprises resulted in a new enthusiasm for monastic planning. These innovative social spaces were assumed to function most optimally when monks had guidelines about how to do their jobs.

Monastic Communities

Their job, more than anything else, was to focus on divine communication: to read, to pray and sing, and to work to understand God, in order to improve the health of their souls and the souls of the people who supported them. For these monks, the meditating mind wasn’t supposed to be at ease. It was supposed to be energised. Their favourite words for describing concentration stemmed from the Latin tenere, to hold tight to something. The ideal was a mens intentus, a mind that was always and actively reaching out to its target.

Divine Communication

And doing that successfully meant taking the weaknesses of their bodies and brains seriously, and to work hard at making them behave. Some of these strategies were tough. Renunciation, for instance. Monks and nuns were supposed to give up the things that most people loved – families, properties, businesses, day-to-day drama – not only to erode their sense of individual entitlement but also to ensure that they wouldn’t be preoccupied by that stuff in their professional lives of prayer. When the mind wanders, the monastic theorists observed, it usually veers off into recent events.

Renunciation Strategies

Cut back your commitments to serious stuff, and you’ll have fewer thoughts competing for your attention. Restraint had to work on a physiological level, too. There were many theories in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages about the connection between the mind and body. Most Christians agreed that the body was a needy creature whose bottomless appetite for food, sex and comfort held back the mind from what mattered most. That didn’t mean that the body must be rejected, only that it needed tough love.

Mind & Body

For all monks and nuns, since the very start of monasticism in the 4th century, this meant a moderate diet and no sex. Many of them also added regular manual labour to the regimen. They found it easier to concentrate when their bodies were moving, whether they were baking or farming or weaving. There were also solutions that might strike people today as strange, which depended on imaginary pictures. Part of monastic education involved learning how to form cartoonish cognitive figures, to help sharpen one’s mnemonic and meditative skills.

Moderate Diet and No Sex

The mind loves stimuli such as colour, gore, sex, violence, noise and wild gesticulations. The challenge was to accept its delights and preferences, in order to take advantage of them. Authors and artists might do some of the legwork here, by writing vivid narratives or sculpting grotesque figures that embodied the ideas they wanted to communicate. But if a nun wanted to really learn something she’d read or heard, she would do this work herself, by rendering the material as a series of bizarre animations in her mind.

Mind Animations

The weirder the mnemonic devices the better – strangeness would make them easier to retrieve, and more captivating to think with when she ‘returned’ to look them over. Say that you wanted to learn the sequence of the zodiac. Thomas Bradwardine (a 14th-century university master, theologian and advisor to Edward III of England) suggests that you imagine a gleaming white ram with golden horns, kicking a bright red bull in the testicles. While the bull bleeds profusely, imagine that there’s a woman in front of it, giving birth to twins, in a gory labour that seems to split her up to her chest.

Thomas Bradwardine 

As her twins burst forth, they’re playing with an awful red crab, which is pinching them and making them cry. And so on. A more advanced method for concentrating was to build elaborate mental structures in the course of reading and thinking. Nuns, monks, preachers and the people they educated were always encouraged to visualise the material they were processing.

Concentrating Methods

A branchy tree or a finely feathered angel – or in the case of Hugh of St Victor (who wrote a vivid little guide to this strategy in the 12th century), a multilevel ark in the heart of the cosmos – could become the template for dividing complex material into an ordered system. The images might closely correspond to the substance of an idea. Hugh, for example, imagined a column rising out of his ark that stood for the tree of life in paradise, which as it ascended linked the earth on the ark to the generations past, and on to the vault of the heavens.

Substances of Ideas

Or instead, the images might only be organisational placeholders, where a tree representing a text or topic (say, ‘Natural Law’) could have eight branches and eight fruits on each branch, representing 64 different ideas clustered into eight larger concepts. The point wasn’t to paint these pictures on parchment. It was to give the mind something to draw, to indulge its appetite for aesthetically interesting forms while sorting its ideas into some logical structure. I teach medieval cognitive techniques to college freshmen, and this last one is by far their favourite.

"Natural Law"

Constructing complex mental apparatuses gives them a way to organise – and, in the process, analyse – material they need to learn for other classes. The process also keeps their minds occupied with something that feels palpable and riveting. Concentration and critical thinking, in this mode, feel less like a slog and more like a game. But caveat cogitator: the problem of concentration is recursive. Any strategy for sidestepping distraction calls for strategies on sidestepping distraction.

"Caveat Cogitator"

When Cassian made one of his simplest recommendations – repeat a psalm over and over, to keep your brain reined in – he knew what he was going to hear next. ‘How can we stay fixated on that verse?’ the monks would ask. Distraction is an old problem, and so is the fantasy that it can be dodged once and for all. There were just as many exciting things to think about 1,600 years ago as there are now. Sometimes it boggled the mind.

Distraction vs Fantasy

Let’s get medieval, and learn from the great tools for concentration practised by the nuns and monks of the Middle Ages

communication

Communication

How to reduce digital distractions: advice from medieval monks | Aeon Ideas

The real world may not have druids and paladins, but it’s chock full of monsters. They’re called “term papers” and “errands” and “mysterious car problems.” [T]here may be one monster that looms larger than all of the others, who clearly needs to be attacked. But before you do, look around for injured monsters — the half-finished tasks that probably need only a few more minutes to complete. If you don’t deal with them now, they’ll be a constant distraction, and may eventually come back stronger.

Kill injured monsters first

In WoW parlance, “grinding” is the process of killing a bunch of fairly easy monsters, one after the other, strictly to rack up loot and experience. There’s no adventure to it...but it’s often the fastest way to level up.Daily life is full of mindless tedium, but there’s an important distinction: grinding has a point. While the task may be dull and carpal tunnel-aggravating, there’s a clear goal. You have to be willing to do serious grunt work in order to move ahead.

Grinding Is Part Of The Game

It’s easy to confuse what you’re doing with why you’re doing it. Grinding is a means of achieving a specific goal, whereas the game itself is supposed to be entertaining. So once you level, stop grinding and start exploring.I worked for a year as a reader, it was good money, but it was wearying. Most of the scripts were terrible. I convinced myself I was “working in the industry,” so I kept reading them.In place of reading, I got a mindless internship in production, I didn’t use my brain once. That left me with abundant energy when I got home from work, and with it I finished two scripts.

But grinding is not the game

My website is really just me running back to the newbie lands and giving away what I can. I could put my advice in a book and charge $15.95 for it, but I see it as the take-a-penny, leave-a-penny flow of information. I regularly search the web for answers on topics in which I’m a newbie and leaving thankful that someone out there took the time to write a tutorial on exactly what I needed. So in exchange, I write up what I know about screenwriting.If everyone took the time to build a site about the areas of their expertise, the world would be significantly cooler.

Give away stuff to newbies

<a href="http://davidco.com/">GTD </a>enthusiasts would label these WoW quests “projects,” and each of the bullet points “next actions.” Most of life’s work consists of a bunch of little activities in the service of a larger goal. You don’t write a script; you write a scene. You don’t design a website; you tweak the CSS so the navigation looks better. No matter what the project is, you can’t finish until you get started, and you can’t get started until you figure out the steps.

Keep track of your quests

one quickly learns the importance of storage: belts, bags, backpacks and chests. Unfortunately, there’s never nearly enough space, and adding more becomes ridiculously expensive. So always keep in mind the carrying costs.Unlike World of Warcraft (or hard drives in the 90’s), digital storage is now cheap. But while the cost of bit storage has plummeted, the cost of storing atoms is still huge. Last year, we cleaned out our garage. Whoever wanted something could email us and take it. They got a free desk, and we got a free garage.

Storage is costly

As you look back at any period of your life, you don’t remember what a solid plan you had. You remember what you did. You remember the adventures, the scrapes, the unanticipated detours that turned out to fascinating. So don’t plan your way out of an exciting life.

Overthinking takes the fun out of it

Those who’ve seen my movie, The Nines, can infer that I had a bit of a World of Warcraft problem back in the day. “The day” being a period of about four months in which most of my waking hours were spent either playing the game or wanting to. The luxury and danger of being […]

Seven Things I Learned from World of Warcraft

Organized people are not born; they are built.The people who emerge as ‘organized’ use a variety of tools and methods to accomplish their goals and priorities in life.

ORGANIZED PEOPLE: SIMPLE BEHAVIOURS 

Organized people are not born; they are built.The people who emerge as ‘organized’ use a variety of tools and methods to accomplish their goals and priorities in life.

Organized people are not born; they are built. The people who emerge as ‘organized’ use a variety of tools and methods to accomplish their goals and priorities in life. Their systems become habits…

ORGANIZED PEOPLE: SIMPLE BEHAVIOURS

If we are trying to maximise the welfare of our society is by maximising our freedom, and the only way to do so, is by maximising our choices

Today's Official Dogma

<ul><li>Everywhere we look, life is a matter of choice</li><li>The more options there are the easier it is to regret about anything an option has</li><li>When you have a lot of choices, your expectations rise towards perfection</li><li>The secret to happiness is low expectations</li><li>When there are no choices to make, if something goes wrong the responsible is the world. Whereas, when there are lots of choices to make, you are the responsible.   </li><li>Better choice is not better than some choice</li><li>Too much freedom becomes paralysis    </li></ul>

Key Insights

<ol><li>Regret and anticipated regret</li><li>Opportunity costs</li><li>Escalation of expectations</li><li>Self blame    </li></ol>

Why Choice Makes People Miserable

<ul><li>It produces paralysis and not liberation</li><li>Even if we manage to make a choice, we end up less satisfied with what we chose    </li></ul>

Negative Effects of Choice

It helped me understand the boundaries of freedom

http://www.ted.com Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.  TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

philosophy

Philosophy

podcasts

Podcasts

http://www.ted.com Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. You're welcome to link to or embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know.

TED's videos may be used for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International) and in accordance with our TED Talks Usage Policy: https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/our-policies-terms/ted-talks-usage-policy. For more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g. employee learning, in a film or online course), please submit a Media Request at https://media-requests.ted.com

The paradox of choice | Barry Schwartz

Experiencing flow seems rather obvious now, when you know what it is. Roughly it can be divided into ten subcategories which, when combined, enable us to perform with the best possible efficiency rate, without wasting time or energy:<ul><li>Clearly understanding what we want to achieve.</li><li>Having the ability to concentrate for a long period of time.</li><li>Losing the feeling of consciousness of ourselves.</li><li>Realising that time passes faster than usual.</li><li>Receiving immediate and direct feedback.</li><li>Experiencing balance between the challenge and our skill levels.</li><li>Being in control of the situation.</li></ul>

The Components Of Flow

<ul><li>Feeling of reward coming from being involved in the activity</li><li>Not being aware of bodily needs</li><li>Being completely engaged in the activity</li></ul>In case you are starting to feel hungry or thirsty after a couple of hours of working,it doesn't necessarily mean that you are doing something wrong.It may simply be an indicator that you have been doing something right for so long,that your body needed an additional input of energy.The same goes for concentration; some people simply lack the ability to stay concentrated for long time.This doesn't automatically imply that they are unable to reach the state of flow.

This book does not teach you only how to manage the time but also give the basic ideas how to understand and save the time.

Time Management is a book about what you need to do to become someone who is good at managing their time. This book is your one-stop shop where you can look forward to getting tips and tricks and practices you can implement into your routine. The book starts with setting the groundwork for you to be successful at becoming better at time management. Any good and effective routine needs to start with the right groundwork, and we will help you get started with this process. Time management is one of the most important factors that influence how successful you will become. The ability to efficiently manage your time is very important not only for those who want to advance in their careers or in their education, but also for everyone who wants to get the most out of life. With proper time management, you can expect to become a more productive person. People will start looking up to you and many opportunities to advance in life will start to appear. Perhaps most importantly, you will find immense satisfaction at being an efficient and productive member of society. As long as you have the discipline and desire to be successful, it is guaranteed that you can take control of your life and live it to the fullest. This book contains proven steps and strategies on how to take control of your life by managing your time right and effectively. This Time Management book contains proven steps and strategies on how to quickly and effectively organize your life and schedule! You will learn how to stop dragging your feet and get productive, regain balance in your life, develop new habits, and much more!

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

books

Books

Time Management: How to Use Visual Maps to Solve Problems & Hack Productivity, Time Management (Increase Productivity and Achieve Success)

<ol><li>Be Proactive</li><li>Learn</li><li>Develop your productivity</li><li class="ql-indent-1"> Work on your innovation muscle</li><li>Learn to write</li><li>Welcome your doubts</li><li>The habit of extending your comfort zone</li><li>Develop a hobby/side hustle</li></ol>

<ol><li>Start with the big picture and keep it in mind</li><li>Learn to sleep well</li><li>Learn to recover in a hostile environment</li><li>﻿ The one thing that makes or kills your day</li></ol>

Develop your productivity

Without anyone asking you to, regularly brainstorm on improvement topics.<ul><li>10 ideas to improve our service meetings that I can share with my boss</li><li>10 ideas to improve the cash collection process</li><li>10 ideas to get more leads….</li></ul>

Work on your innovation muscle

I've read over 300 books, gone from salesman to executive, run a 9-figure business. If I had to summarize how to grow a career, I would keep these 8 points...

8 habits to grow your career. What I've learned in 20 years and after reading over 300 books.

Show your willingness to get things done. Making a promise to yourself is a good way to hold yourself accountable. This can be achieved by jotting down your goals, having a to-do list handy, and setting reminders on the phone and in the calendar.

1. They are committed to themselves.

“Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success.”

If you can’t hold yourself accountable, you may find it easier to hold others to account. Tell everyone what you want to do and discuss your goals. Tell your friends, colleagues, and employers about your projects; you don’t want to disappoint them.

2. They hold themselves accountable to others.

Self-awareness is a trait shared by many successful people. Self-awareness helps you understand why you are delaying. When you understand why to procrastinate, it will be easier to devise a strategy to overcome it.

3. They are aware of themselves.

CLICK THE LINK https://medium.com/@hackedongrowth/how-productive-individuals-overcome-procrastination-f14472cefe6c

GET STARTED WITH THESE STEPS 

5 strategies for overcoming procrastination that successful individuals employ.

Everyone seems to be susceptible to procrastination. Even the most prosperous people face it on a daily basis. Successful individuals, on the other hand, do something that most of us don’t: they take…

How Productive Individuals Overcome Procrastination

Find 100+ Tips for Time Management - Curated from inspiring sources like Books, Podcasts & Articles - Genuine Insights from like-minded Users like You!

7 Proven Ways to Develop Razor-Sharp Focus

5 Reasons Why Consistency is an Important Habit

A Wellness Game To Find Balance

How to reduce digital distractions: advice from medieval monks | Aeon Ideas

Seven Things I Learned from World of Warcraft

ORGANIZED PEOPLE: SIMPLE BEHAVIOURS

The paradox of choice | Barry Schwartz

Time Management: How to Use Visual Maps to Solve Problems & Hack Productivity, Time Management (Increase Productivity and Achieve Success)

8 habits to grow your career. What I've learned in 20 years and after reading over 300 books.

How Productive Individuals Overcome Procrastination

It's time to Read like a Pro.

It's time to
Read like a Pro.