The Secret Sauce Of Productivity

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In this complex world filled with noise and distractions, we may sometimes find it impossible to achieve calmness, wellness, and productivity at its fullest. Meditation will make you more productive. It might sound strange that sitting still and doing nothing for a period of time will make you more productive, but it’s true. Dr. Sundardas walks us through the process of meditation. He enumerates its benefits such as making you more productive, energized, calm, and all good things that will surely help you get the best out of yourself.

 

The Secret Sauce Of Productivity

 

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Meditation will make you more productive. It might sound strange that sitting still and doing nothing for a period of time will make you more productive, but it’s true. Before diving into what to do, it’s worth going over why you should meditate in the first place. I’ve combined benefits observed by research with my personal observations over the last 40 years I’ve been meditating, which is slightly less scientific. Some benefits of meditation include greatly calming effects. Research has shown that EEG activity decreases during meditation. Meditation also helps to recharge you so you have more energy throughout the day. The practice increases the blood flow in your brain and according to one neurophysiologist rewires the circuitry of your brain. It’s been proven that people who meditate need less sleep. Meditation makes your brain age slower and increases the amount of grey matter in your brain.

Grey matter is responsible for muscle control, hearing, memory, emotions, and speech. Meditation makes it much easier to focus and achieve flow and the feeling of being completely immersed and energized by something. It also allows you to procrastinate less and get more done in the same amount of time. The practice has even shown to boost student’s test scores by 11% in one study. Meditation helps your mind defragment your thoughts so that you can make sense of them and step away from them to gain perspective. Needless to say, there are tons of benefits adopting a regular meditation practice, and these are just a few of them. Meditation is a very simple practice that people overcomplicate. This podcast focuses on the breathing meditation where you focus on your breath. Just imagine that.

Meditation helps you to recharge so you have more energy throughout the day.

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The basic idea of meditation is simple. Every time your mind begins to shift the spotlight away from your breath and you get lost in thought, simply bring your attention back to your breath. Repeat this again and again until your meditation time resounds. The point is, every time you bring your attention back to your breath, you work out your attention muscle. Over time, your focus, concentration, and attention span improve in addition to the plethora of other benefits mentioned above. That’s the basic idea of meditation. You will need two things to get started but ensure that both of them are ready. You don’t need much of anything, but you should have two things. You should have some things to sit on. There’s such a thing as standing meditation and walking meditation, but sitting meditation is the most common and the best place to start. Since meditation is all about working out your attention muscle, having to check a clock somewhat defeats the purpose of meditation since it would constantly distract your attention away from your breath.

When I first started to meditate, I remember being dumbfounded on what exactly I had to do after I sat down. Two things confused me. How do I sit and what do I think about? Those are essentially the only things you need to worry about when it comes to meditation. How to sit? The biggest thing is to remember to keep your back straight. Keep your back erect. If you’re in a chair, it’s best not to rest your back on the back of the chair and keep an upright posture. Your eyes can be either closed or open. The goal of this whole meditation thing is to work out your attention muscle. Don’t worry about your hands. Some people like to form a circle with the thumb and another finger, but that doesn’t matter in my opinion. Cross the legs however you want. I cross my legs in front of me and I think that was fine for most people. If you want to put your feet like a pretzel, you can. Use meditation to strengthen your attention muscle. It may be the easiest cheat to a simple cross-legged pose. Look slightly downward even if your eyes are closed. This opens up your chest. Find a place that’s comfortable and that keeps you upright and opens up your chest at the same time.

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Benefits Of Meditation: Finding a quiet place with less distraction allows you to concentrate better during meditation.

 

The biggest part I can make about how to sit is to find the pose and posture that’s both comfortable and keeps you upright. The attention you give the different things around you is a spotlight. All day you’re moving around and pointed out different things. Without thinking too much about the fact that you’re doing this, as you move it around, you pointed at everything. You give attention too in your life, from your smartphone to a conversation you’re having to a report you’re writing. A lot of the time, you directed more than one thing at a time. Meditation takes that spotlight and it points directly at your breath so all of that is well and good, but what do you do exactly? First, get comfortable. Open the timer on your phone and get into an upright and comfortable posture. Dim the lights a bit or shut them off completely to help you focus better. Start your timer and bring your attention focused in your breath. This is what meditation is all about and this is what makes meditation both difficult and worthwhile.

In this third step, close your mouth and focusing on entirely on your breath as it enters and leaves your nose. Don’t think this is a hard part. Don’t analyze your breath. Just bring your attention and focus to your breath without thinking about it or analyzing it. Bring your attention back to your mind when it wanders and it works. I’ve been meditating for about 40 years and my mind still wanders sometimes. When your mind wanders, and it will, gently bring your attention back to your breath. Once you realize that your mind is wandering, just gently bring your attention back. Bring your mind back when it wanders. When your mind begins to think, gently bring your attention back to your breath. Meditate for ten minutes a day. It’s infinitely better than meditating for 70 minutes once a week. Try to meditate every day if possible, even if that just means sitting for a few minutes.

Start small. You may try to meditate for 30 minutes right from the start. I can almost guarantee that you will get frustrated and discouraged. I recommend starting with five minutes and only increasing that time when you’re comfortable. Meditate in a quiet place. Having fewer distractions around you will naturally allow you to concentrate better and will make your meditation much more productive. It’s easier to lose your attention during your out-breath. Your in-breath is very pronounced and easier to concentrate on. Most people’s minds wander on the out-breaths. Keep this in mind. Be easy on yourself when your mind wanders. It’s easy to become frustrated with yourself when your mind wanders, but don’t. Your meditation will be much more productive when you gently bring your attention back. If you can’t concentrate, try counting. Count your breaths until you reach five and then start again. I use this trick when I’m having a tough time concentrating.

The goal of meditation is to bring attention to yourself.

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One lucky listener that post a review in iTunes will win a private and confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your sole purpose. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover your unique mind and body psychosomatic map of your life. You’re going to get a detail report and a personal 45-minute consultation with me that’s worth thousands. I’m going to help you design a life that works so you are able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The clearer you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you step into to your true potential, stay on track, and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen? Feel free to reach out to me to ask a question at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift, design it. Do what matters and join me each week as we get closer to design the life of your dreams. Join me on the next episode of Life by Design.

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The Pareto Principle Of Productivity

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There is not much that we can do with what is already in front of us, but we can always decide what to do with the time we are given. To truly find a fulfilling life, we have to create a life design by following three critical actions: plan in three to five years chunk, plan for each task in fifteen minutes, and plan backwards from three to five years. Understand how this works in both your life and business, and learn the value of your time and become more productive as you learn the Pareto principle, taking to heart how 20% of your activities will contribute to 80% of your success and happiness.

 

The Pareto Principle Of Productivity

Pareto Principle

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf. “So do all who lived to see such times, but it’s not for them to decide and all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us,” Said J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring. You need to be motivated to do life design for a fulfilling life. Also it produces tons of benefits like having a clear sense of direction. Remember one major priority that everything revolves around. More than that, eventually lackluster overwhelms you and you get pulled in a thousand different directions. Every time you manage time for a fulfilling life, there are generally some critical actions that you take. You need to plan in three or five-year chunks. Plan for each task in fifteen-minute chunks and plan backwards from three to five years to the present.

List three actions that will help you out in good life design. More importantly, they bring forth other improvements in your life. A life design for a fulfilling life will be something that has often many people feel better about themselves. Those who start planning in three or five-year chunks, they recognized significant adjustments in their mental well-being. These people will feel better prepared to tackle other things in life. Preparing ahead of time allows you to be stronger than you were before. This enables you to complete more than you could before and not run out of energy as easily. More importantly, it helps to build mental and emotional muscles so that you are more resilient and capable when the situation calls for it.

The Pareto Principle is extremely important for growing any business or even for running your life. The 80/20 Principle has been tried and tested in situations. It holds up under scrutiny but there is a downside as well as an upside. The Pareto Principle has been successfully applied to a variety of different areas and holds true in an astonishingly wide variety of fields. The Pareto Principle applies to you because 20% of your activities will contribute to 80% of your success and happiness. The Pareto Principle is perhaps most famous for its suggestion that successful people tend to achieve 80% of the results from 20% of the activities. The 80/20 rule is often used to improve productivity in people and business and usually to identify how time can be saved or use more effectively. One will insert 80% effort and just achieve 20% results if one does not abide by this rule. The idea is small but consistent actions over time.

In business, your time should be spent conducting business with your best clients. Efficiency should never be the end in itself because when efficiency alone makes the goal, you are more often just making yourself busy than making yourself productive. Effective time managers will spend your time on important objectives that will help them attain important goals. Even in developing short, medium and long-term goals, you can organize your time and tasks well where you choose to work on your own productivity curve largely determines what you accomplish in your work and your business. The end of the curve, the things you do will have great value.

The principle known as the Pareto is often referred to in business as how you will get 80% of profit from just 20% of your clients. There are some business experts who will go as far suggesting firing 80% of unprofitable clients. By increasing sales for your best clients and businesses, you can reduce costs. By letting go bad clients and focusing on selling and improving the best services, the best clients, your business will flourish. This may seem very harsh but the reality is that given how little time, energy and resources you have, if you’re going to get better at what you do and you’re going to get better at serving people, you need to ensure that effective on how you spend your time, effort and energy to get the best possible results.

Question, are you spending 80% of your productive time on activities that only produce 20% of your results? Are you spending 20% of your productive time on activities that produce 80% of your total results? To help you discover which position you are in, let’s start doing some research on your work habits and how you spend your productive time. I did this exercise for myself and made some amazing discoveries and breakthroughs. Notice how much time you spend on activities over a three-day period on one business-related profit-producing activities. Two, business-related non-profit producing activities. Three, personal activities. For those of you who feel you’re not in business and you are working, look at business relates that profit-producing as work-related, results-producing, business-related, nonprofit producing as work-related but produces no observable desirable results.

 

As you go through each day, jot down everything you do and how long you spend on each activity. Be as accurate as you can. After you complete the three days’ worth of activity tracking, go back and categorize your activities by business-related, profit-producing, business-related nonprofit producing, plus a category for personal activities. You can also include any categories you think are important and applicable to this exercise and your business. Make sure you make a note of the results you have achieved from the time spent on each activity. Add up the time you spend on each category of activity over the three-day period and the total time spent. Then calculate the percentage of the total that was spent on each category. Take a look at what this exercise shows you. How did you spend your productive time? Was it on profitable activities or non-profit producing activities? What result was produced? What percentage of your productive time did it take to achieve these results? Was the time spent on personal activities more time than the time you spend on business activities? Was the time spent on non-profitable business activities more than the time you spent on profitable business activities?

If you’re getting 20% of your results from 80% of your business activities, think about what will happen if the 80/20 rule is in your favor. It’s all about knowing the value of your time and when your most productive time occurs. Then you can start leveraging your strengths to achieve your profitable activities before you spend time with anything else, especially the non-profitable activities. The time management habit patterns from the age 25 or by the next 40 years will result by age 65 in the following statistics. By 65, 1% are wealthy, 4% are financially fit, 5% are still working, 28% are dead and 62% are flat broke. Let’s roll up our sleeves and figure out what the value of your time needs to be to get to where you want to be. When you’re filled up and actually done the exercise, you will realize that you can only maximize your dollar value per hour by increasing the time that you spend on business-related profit-producing activities.

Here’s the reality check. You can have your best year ever, but if you want to get progress towards the things that matter, then we have to change our approach. We have to be clear about how our big goals translate into our day-to-day actions. We are going to take the first steps with this specific set of simple actions. Whatever you like to accomplish in your career, your relationships, your health or the impact you want to have in your community and the world, this too will give you what you need to know and exactly what it takes to stay on track so life doesn’t pull you astray. That’s why this podcast is focused on this. It’s designed to help you get intentional about how you spend your time. One lucky listener that posts a review in iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your life’s and soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a journey to discover the unique mind-body, psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45-minute consultation with me that is worth thousands.

On this podcast, I’m going to help you design a life that works so you’re able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The clearer you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you step into your true potential, stay on track, and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen? Feel free to reach out to me, to ask questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift. Design it. Do what matters and join me each week as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams.

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