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Productivity

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How to Be Productive - The Mindmap of 35 Habits by Anna Vital. How Changing Your Breathing Can Change Your Life (INFOGRAPHIC) The best way to calm down is so innate to our lives, we often take it for granted: Taking a breath. Focusing on your own breathing can have a significant impact on your well-being and stress levels, and can even create physiological changes like lowering your blood pressure. But for many of us, when it comes to improving our health, changing our breathing somehow doesn’t spring to mind as readily as changing our diet or exercise habits. “We take our breath for granted the way we take our heart beat for granted,” Carla Ardito, a breathing expert at Manhattan’s Integral Yoga Institute and creator of the Breathing Lessons app, told The Huffington Post. “The difference is we can work on our breathing.” And there’s plenty of precedent. For thousands of years, the yogic practice of pranayama (Sanskrit for “extension of the life-force”) has been used as a method geared towards reducing stress and healing the body and mind through targeted breathing exercises.

Also on HuffPost: Alamy. 25 brain lubricants to generate ideas [chart. When you’ve got a bad case of creative block, you’ll try just about anything to escape the funk. Rather than wandering aimlessly, though, take direction from Feldman Creative‘s list of twenty-five ways to lube up those brain gears and get going. Via Convince & Convert. Get creative with infographics. Nine Creativity-Sparking Tips. “Picture this: you with a big block of time; a serene, aesthetically pleasing hotel suite with free daily massages, a pool, and a delightful café; a privacy agreement signed by encouraging family members, friends and coworkers (though you may, of course, call them); breakfast in bed from room service with abundant choices from bacon and espresso to granola and green tea; pads of paper and a box of pens in your favorite colors; and an absolutely perfect laptop.” – from “Write. 10 Days to Overcome Writer’s Block. Period.” by Karen E. Peterson, Ph.D Since the above scenario is not very likely to take place for most people, here are nine creativity-sparking tips to help inspire you when the laundry needs to be done, you feel a cold coming on, and the cat just knocked over everything on your nightstand. 1.

“I was writing at night only because I had a day job; I worked in a school. Stop telling yourself that you don’t have the time to write, paint, make music, and so on. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 10 Laws of Productivity. You might think that creatives as diverse as Internet entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, industrial design firm Studio 7.5, and bestselling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami would have little in common. In fact, the tenets that guide how they – and exceptionally productive creatives across the board – make ideas happen are incredibly similar.

Here are 10 laws of productivity we’ve consistently observed among serial idea executors: 1. Break the seal of hesitation. A bias toward action is the most common trait we’ve found across the hundreds of creative professionals and entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed. While preparing properly as you start a new project is certainly valuable, it’s also easy to lose yourself in planning (and dreaming) indefinitely. 2. When our ideas are still in our head, we tend to think big, blue sky concepts. 3. Trial and error is an essential part of any creative’s life. To avoid ‘blue sky paralysis,’ pare your idea down to a small, immediately executable concept. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Happiness

Memory. 9 Ways to Increase Efficiency in Your Company. In order to reach their goals, some businesses ask their employees to work longer hours. While this is necessary in some cases, you may consider an alternative approach: finding ways to be more efficient with the time you have. Smart work can increase productivity more than hard work. Regardless of your businesses product or service, there are many ways to increase efficiency. Consider the following 9 points: 1. Get a Good Start This is key. 2. More gets done when people work together. 3. Spending more time travelling in the car translates into more time sitting in your office. 4.

In the trenches of daily work, employees can loose track of goals over time. 5. Customers of your product or service know better than anyone what works well and what doesn’t. 6. When a worker enjoys what they are doing, they will be more productive. 7. It’s easy to be distracted even in your plain, perhaps boring office. 8.

Clichés bug me, but some of them are true. 9. Don’t be like the fisherman.

Used

Are These 8 Mistakes Sabotaging Your Resolution to Change Your Life? Maybe it’s something simple like getting up an hour earlier every day so you don’t spend the whole morning barking orders at your kids like an army sergeant as your rush them out the door without so much as a goodbye kiss. Or maybe it’s something a little more ambitious like getting your finances in order so you can finally quit the job you hate to become a musician, a writer, an Iron Chef or a globetrotter who has No Reservations. Whatever it is, you are excited. Determined. All set to change your life. Except, quite innocently, you may be making the mistakes that could quietly sabotage all your efforts.

Luckily, once you know what these mistakes are, they are quite easy to fix. So, here is a quick overview of what to avoid in your exciting journey of creating a new life. 1. When you start out to change something in your life, it is quite easy to get stoked and carried away into thinking that the change will happen immediately. The fix: Be realistic. 2. We human beings are inherently lazy. Why We Procrastinate, and How to Stop It. How to Manage Time by Thinking Like an Investor. Knowing how to manage time is essential for your personal effectiveness.

While there are many approaches to time management, here I’d like to focus on just one key mindset that I believe you should have: an investor’s mindset. Many people invest in financial instruments. I do, and most likely you do too. It’s common to think like an investor when it comes to money. But that’s not the case with time.

I believe, however, that the principle of investing is equally applicable to time. Time is like money. The fact is that your time is a limited resource that’s even more limited than money. The Benefits of Thinking Like an Investor Thinking like an investor helps you use your time wisely. You will be careful not to waste your time A good investor always tries to cut wasteful expenses and avoid losing money. Ways to Invest Your Time Now that we have seen the benefits, how should we invest our time? 1. This, in my opinion, is the starting point. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Photo by aussiegall. Lifehacker, tips and downloads for getting things done.