Tozer, author of the spiritual classic The Pursuit of God, you can spend an entire year strengthening your daily walk with God. Each devotion includes a passage of Scripture, a short reading from Tozer, a hymn verse, and a prayer. For days, let this great man of faith challenge your heart and mind to truer worship, greater faith, deeper prayer, and more passion for Christ. My Daily Pursuit is an invitation to spend a few minutes every day in the presence of Jesus, guided by one of His most trustworthy servants.
Let A. Tozer guide you in your pursuit of God. His books are available worldwide in multiple languages. Tom's biblical, practical teaching transcends denominational lines. Nearly 20, people have attended his worship seminars, retreats, and conferences in churches all across North America. Worship understood and practiced from a scriptural point of view will affect the entire life of a believer as well as the lives of those he or she encounters.
Worship understood and practiced by a church will affect an entire community. With preconceived ideas and cultural familiarity set aside, Tom Kraeuter invites his readers to experience and enjoy the breadth and essence of biblical worship. Tina started seeing a therapist immediately after leaving an abusive relationship to gain an understanding to why she kept picking bad men into her life.
She knew something was wrong. Originally Tina started recording her journey in hopes it would help someone else coming out of an abusive relationship. Her entire world changed from what she knew as a successful business woman and socialite to losing everything and everyone in her life. This is a story of pain, great sadness, the agony of the healing process, and seeking God into the final healing she would receive in the desert.
Trying to lose weight is a tough and relentless effort. You starve yourself for days hoping to lose a few pounds, or you cut all carbs and feel weak and lethargic News Flash!!! All that works is sticking to a proven plan without faltering. You need discipline, motivation and desire and then you will get the results you want. It doesn't take anything more than that to get into shape. If you've been trying to lose weight without any or much success, you may have just stumbled upon something that could finally help you shed those pounds for good - without a single day of starvation or any crazy, weird fad diet!
What if I told you, you could burn fat 24 hours a day? The amount of exercise and sleep we get and the food we eat can greatly influence these mental functions in the short termeven within hours. The mental functions we engage in just prior to tackling a task can also have a powerful effect on whether we accomplish that task. Research findings from the fields of psychology and neuroscience are revealing a great deal about when and how we can set up periods of highly effective mental functioning.
In this book, Ill share in detail five deceptively simple strategies that I have found are the most suc-. Recognize your decision points. Once you start a task, you run largely on autopilot, which makes it hard to change course.
Maximize the power of those moments in between tasksthats when you can choose what to take on next, and can therefore decide to tackle what matters most. Manage your mental energy. Tasks that need a lot of self-control or focused attention can be depleting, and tasks that make you highly emotional can throw you off your game.
Schedule tasks based on their processing demand and recovery time. Stop fighting distractions. Learn to direct your attention. Your attention systems are designed to wander and refresh, not to focus indefinitely.
Trying to fight that is like trying to fight the ocean tides. Understanding how your brain works will help you get back on track quickly and effectively when you get distracted. Leverage your mindbody connection.
Move your body and eat in ways that set you up for success in the short term. You can eat and physically do whatever you want on your downtime. Make your workspace work for you. Learn what environmental factors help you be on top of your. Once you know what distracts you or what primes your brain to be in creating or risk- taking modes, you can adjust your environment for productivity. These strategies, derived from neuroscience and psychology, may sound simple; some may even seem like common sense.
But we rarely employ them. Understanding the science behind them helps us know whats worth acting on and how to do so within the constraints we have. We can all learn to deploy them regularly and consciously with powerful results. Theres nothing magical about two hours. Im recommending two hours because Ive found that length of time to be both attainable and sufficient for getting to enough of what matters each day.
The specific number of hours is not critical. As you gain experience with these strategies, you can set up conditions for four hours or even just ten minutes of peak mental functioning, depending on what suits your needs that day. Note that Im not suggesting you identify two specific and consistent hours every day say, from nine to eleven a. If you are like most busy professionals, you dont always have control over when things need to get done. If you are a morning person and your boss asks you to give a presentation at the next staff meetingin the middle of the afternoon.
These strategies can help you set up the conditions for peak mental effectiveness at any time in your workday. While I believe that you can accomplish great things under the right conditions, Im not suggesting youll be able to get all your work done in just two awesome hours. I do think, however, that when you are mentally effective, you can accomplish whatever matters most to you at that moment, with pride in your work and inspiration to do more.
The rest of the day you can devote to those tasks that dont require much strategic or creative thinking: slog through e-mails, fill out forms, collect reimbursements, manage schedules, pay bills, plan travel, return phone calls.
You can more successfully decide what to let go of among those tasks, too, when youre thinking more effectively. Working in tandem with our biologysetting up the conditions for a couple of hours of peak productivity allows us not only to focus on the tasks that are most important to us and our success but also to restore some sanity and balance to our lives. Mast ering Your P ro d u c tivity. Everyone is capable of learning to be as effective as they want to be. And in the rest of the book, Ill show you how.
Ill describe how the five strategies work, explain the science behind them, and share stories that show them. Open navigation menu. Close suggestions Search Search. User Settings.
Skip carousel. They keep us constantly monitoring incoming e-mails, texts, calls, and status alerts. They offer countless opportunities to get sucked into activities—reading news, playing games, tinkering with apps.
They contribute to our mental fatigue by increasing the number of decisions we have to make as we answer e-mails and texts well after the workday is over. In short, these devices make it really, really hard to be in the mental shape required for good thinking and great work.
Imagine if someone set booby traps around your office—maybe a bucket of water is balanced precariously on top of a door, so it will tip and drench you when you walk in, or a bunch of thumbtacks or a whoopee cushion wait for you on your seat. You have created a work setting booby-trapped not with buckets of water and thumbtacks but with phones, screens, websites, open doors, etc. If you want to maximize your attention, limiting noises and turning off as many of these devices as possible is a great place to start.
Close your office door or, if you work in an open space, wear noisecancelling headphones. Forward your calls to voice mail. Or better yet, rely on pen and paper. Researchers have found that there are ways of training the brain to sustain attention more effectively too.
It may not be for everyone, but if you are so inclined, meditation practice can help. A team at the University of London gave a group of seasoned meditators and a group of non-meditators a sustained attention test.
These kinds of tests require people to pay attention for a specific amount of time in order to perform well. In this particular case, study participants heard a series of beeps and had to report how many they heard in each series.
Fewer errors would mean better attention. You can probably imagine how boring the task would be, and therefore how much sustained attention would be needed, making it a good diagnostic test. Meditators had better sustained attention than non-meditators, and those with the most meditation practice had the best performance. So what can you do to stay productive when you do get distracted? The answer may surprise you. Daydreaming is not a skill that we are encouraged to develop.
If our minds wander a lot, we consider it a flaw that we need to manage, something to be embarrassed about. Research, however, suggests that mind wandering may not be a flaw after all. It may have important benefits when it comes to our performing the kinds of tasks that are among the most cognitively challenging to professionals: creative problem solving and long-term planning. From a pediatrician who is trying to decide on the best and safest course of treatment for a tricky case to a manager who needs to design a process for the members of her team all located in different countries to effectively communicate with one another, professionals in every industry face complex tasks that require creative solutions.
Most of us assume that the best way to deal with a problem that requires a creative solution is to focus on it relentlessly. But a team of researchers based out of the University of California at Santa Barbara has found that this might not be the case.
It involves presenting participants with a common object, like a bottle, and then giving them a limited amount of time to list as many uses as they can think of for that object. A second group was asked to perform a cognitively easier challenge, known to elicit mind wandering.
A third group was asked to rest and do nothing during this twelve-minute break. A fourth group was given no break at all. Immediately after this twelve-minute period, the first three groups were given a questionnaire, asking them to rate how frequently they focused on thoughts that were not related to the tasks assigned to them e.
In this way, the researchers could monitor that mind wandering did, in fact, occur, as they had expected. Then participants in all groups were asked to complete four more unusual uses tasks— two of these were exactly the same as the tasks they had completed before the twelve-minute break, and the two others were completely new. The researchers found that participants in the second group, who were asked to perform an easy cognitive challenge in between the unusual uses tasks, had, as expected, significantly more mind wandering than those in the first group, who were asked to perform a task with a more demanding working memory load.
And sure enough, those in this second group—whose minds wandered the most—were the only participants who did better on the two unusual uses tasks that were the same as the tasks done before the break. In other words, participants who did more mind wandering got more creative on the repeated unusual uses tasks; they came up with more creative solutions to the problems presented to them after they had some time to let their brains chew on them, so to speak.
The other three groups—the one that performed the cognitively demanding work, the one that did nothing, and the one that was given no break at all—showed no improvement on the repeated unusual uses tasks. It is worth noting that none of the four groups—including the group whose minds wandered most—showed any improvement on the new unusual uses tasks.
The study suggests that if you want to solve a particularly dicey problem, letting your mind wander by engaging in an unrelated and cognitively easy task can help you find some creative solutions to that problem. The UC Santa Barbara research team even found evidence that people who daydream more frequently in everyday life are generally more creative. So the next time you find your mind drifting away from a complex challenge or a problem you are trying to creatively solve, rather than yell at yourself for losing your focus—as Amanda did in the opening scenario—just let it happen and reap the benefits of mind wandering.
In a separate study, also led by the UC Santa Barbara lab, study participants were given a task discerning odd and even numbers as fast as possible when prompted and a working memory challenge—not to see how well they could perform but to give them a cognitive task demanding enough that they would need to stay focused.
At multiple times throughout the experiment, the participants were interrupted and asked to communicate what they were thinking about at that moment. Instead, their minds wandered primarily to the future, and in particular, thinking about themselves and their goals. When their minds wandered, they defaulted to sorting out their personal plans.
Had they stayed purely focused, they would have missed out on that important mental work. Barnum putting on a sideshow while the stage is being rebuilt. Enjoy the show, and when you turn back to the main stage, the next act will be ready to delight you. In fact, getting sidetracked is what mind wandering can help you prevent, because it provides a useful alternative to what really sidetracks you.
I see two ways that you can increase your productivity by letting go of your focus in a deliberate way. That way you can let your mind wander productively, rather than get absorbed in something else too compelling. Thus, they have a built-in mechanism that will enable your mind to drift away but then also drift back a short time later to what matters.
These tasks require a little thinking, but not much. The second way you can become more productive by letting go of your focus is through engaging in mindful attention.
You may have heard of mindfulness-based stress reduction MBSR ,12 a practice we owe in large part to Jon Kabat-Zinn, who adapted elements of certain Eastern meditation traditions into a structured course for Westerners. MBSR has been shown to be useful for stress reduction,13 emotion regulation,14 and fatigue,15 among many other benefits.
I am not suggesting that you take an eight-week MBSR program and then build twenty minutes of meditation practice into your daily routine. While there can be benefits to doing so, I believe there is a lesson captured in the idea of mindful attention that we can start to apply now. Mindful attention means letting our thoughts go where they want to—that is, letting our minds wander—and, after noting without judgment that our thoughts have drifted, gently bringing our attention back to what we are experiencing in the present moment.
When your attention drifts at some point, simply note the fact that it drifted as interesting, and gently bring your attention back to the book. When we find ourselves mind wandering, it is possible to become an impartial observer of our wandering thoughts, rather than berate ourselves for getting off task. When we avoid becoming frustrated, frazzled, or further distracted by our inability to focus, we can be more effective at bringing our attention back to the task at hand. Surfers could, in theory, chase after every wave that comes to them.
But to have a great session, they let most of them go, until the one that feels and looks right comes along. And the right wave can be truly epic. Your thoughts are like those waves. When you are trying to be productive and focus on a task, many—perhaps hundreds—of thoughts will come your way. Mindfully attending to those thoughts means watching the thoughts go by and noting whatever comes up—e. The key is to let go of those thoughts that are not helping you stay on track, the way a surfer passes up the opportunity to ride those waves that are not quite right.
Brains have lots of thoughts. Be that mental surfer and surf your thought waves. Quite the contrary to reacting to each thought, if we let those thoughts go, we create the opportunity for our attention to eventually drift back to the original task at hand. When your mind wanders, trust that it needs a minute to do some processing, refreshing, or updating. If you become distracted by, for example, thoughts of a new diet, consciously notice that thought for a couple of minutes rather than wish it away, but without mindlessly following that thought where it wants to take you— to, say, a health website or a blog by a diet guru.
This, of course, is easier said than done. But we have a lot of practice letting our brains zero in on distractions as they are designed to do and then simply falling prey to them. Just sit with your drifting thoughts. Your brain will do what your brain is designed to do: find distractions and zero in on them. Amanda could have prevented her partner from interrupting her focus by closing the door to her office or letting everyone in her firm know that she would be unavailable for the next couple of hours.
She could have turned off the e-mail notification function in her computer to avoid the temptation to open every new message that came in. She could have even installed software that blocks access to her favorite gossip site at certain times of the day. But she could not have stopped as easily her distracting thoughts about her delinquent client or her lack of exercise—or hundreds of other thoughts—from interrupting her focus. Her only chance to stay on task in the face of these distractions is to let go: to accept these interruptions, allow for some valuable mind wandering, and then gently bring her attention back to her task after a few minutes.
And to do that, what she needs more than anything is to cut herself some slack. I hope this strategy has shed light on the fact that letting our minds wander is not only normal but also desirable. The next time you find yourself daydreaming, be nice to yourself. It may just be what makes the next couple of hours awesomely productive. These three strategies alone could help you make every day hugely productive—if only you had complete control over your calendar.
But, of course, none of us do. Sometimes we find ourselves not thinking very clearly, being anxious, or generally feeling overwhelmed, but our jobs demand that we perform. Often our daily schedules are filled with presentations that were planned weeks ago, deadlines imposed by our bosses or clients, recurring meetings with our colleagues, and so on.
In short, sometimes we want to be at our mental best at specified times and for previously scheduled tasks. For peak mental functioning in these circumstances, we can add one more strategy: leveraging the immediate effects of physical activity and food to improve our mental functioning.
For example, Jennifer—who through the years worked her way up to being the head of human resources for a tenthousand-plus-person organization—has to meet the Japanese owners of the parent company, who are in town. Twenty minutes before the meeting, her stomach is so knotted up from drinking too much coffee and eating the candies she keeps at her desk, and her neck muscles are so sore from stressing out over reviewing the agenda on her computer again and again, that she is highly distracted and irritable.
Ten minutes before the meeting, she finds herself standing in the bathroom, wishing this hour could just be over. Do I really look that old? Her body is broadcasting on the outside what she feels like on the inside.
That our physical states influence our mental states is at once obvious and revolutionary. On the other hand, it is revolutionary because we seldom act on this intuitive knowledge.
For a long time, the mind was treated as though it were independent of the body —and the body was treated perhaps as only a life support system for the mind. Recent research, however, confirms and helps us act on what we know intuitively—that our physical states affect our mental states deeply.
The mind and the body are so intertwined, in fact, that we often confuse how we feel physically with how we feel emotionally —and this can be an incredible tool when setting up two awesome hours of productivity. In a well-documented study, done in the s, two researchers—Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer—gave study participants an injection of adrenaline, telling them it was a vitamin solution. But other participants were either not told there would be any physical side effects or given a list of fake side effects they could expect.
The participants were then exposed either to a situation that was likely to elicit elation or a situation likely to cause anger. Those who had been told to expect the actual side effects from the injection more often identified those side effects as physical sensations.
But those who had not been told about the actual side effects tended to experience the physical symptoms—the flushed face, the shaking, and the increased heart rate —as emotions elation or anger, depending on the situation they were exposed to. What Schachter and Singer showed was that it can be very difficult to distinguish a physical feeling from an emotional one.
The two are thought to be tightly connected. Your emotions can feel just as real to you, regardless of whether they were elicited by a situation or by a physical response to a substance, such as adrenaline. Since that is the case, then changing what your body feels like can be a way to help change your mental state. However, is it possible that caffeine could from time to time induce you to feel different emotionally? Or might you mistake the physical effects from eating a heavy carb-packed meal with irritation toward a coworker?
If you like, go ahead and eat a gigantic carb-heavy lunch, slump at your desk for hours on end, and avoid regular exercise. But save that behavior for the hours when you are not planning to tackle tasks for which you need to be in top mental shape. By understanding how exercise and food affect your mental functioning, you can use them as tools to help you be more productive when work demands it—for example, when you are about to give a presentation, working to meet a deadline, or getting ready for an intense meeting with a client.
Of course, any time you change your eating or exercise patterns, you should check with a doctor first. But he attributed his clarity of thought and resilience in part to his physical activity —even when he was confined to a cell day after day. In his autobiography, Mandela revealed that while he was in jail, from Monday through Thursday he used to run in place for a maximum of forty-five minutes as well as do pushups, sit-ups, and other exercises.
In this strategy, I will highlight the message Mandela seemed to have understood very deeply: that physical exercise has a near-term effect on mental performance. There are immediate benefits of exercising—which can occur after a single session of activity—that you may not hear about from health and fitness sources and that pertain to your mental state. Even a little exercise at the right time can help you think better, stay focused, sharpen your thoughts, and reduce your anxiety—key elements of sustained productivity—in the hours that follow the physical activity.
For example, one meta-analysis showed that exercising for ten to forty minutes has a consistent and immediate effect of improving executive functions. Research suggests that physical exercise particularly enhances the executive functions that have to do with self-control. In another example, a group of researchers in Japan asked participants in their study to take a common psychological test called the Stroop test.
Participants will say either the word or the color in which that word appears. In the color-word test, a shorter reaction time for correct answers is considered a measure of better inhibitory control. Then those participants were asked to rest for fifteen minutes before taking another Stroop test. Meanwhile, a control group was asked simply to rest for twenty-five minutes they did no exercise but waited the overall same amount of time before taking another Stroop test.
These are precisely the kinds of cognitive functions talked about in strategy 2 that suffer when we get mentally fatigued. A research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign asked participants to exercise at a moderate level on a treadmill for twenty minutes at 60 percent maximum heart rate, which would again be something like the intensity level of a brisk walk or light jog for many people.
In a flanker task, participants have to ignore distracting stimuli on a screen that flanks either side of a target they are looking for.
The Urbana—Champaign team found that moderate exercise not only helps to sharpen attention but it may do so by fine-tuning very early attention to incoming information. This suggests that a little exercise can help you focus or concentrate, while also avoiding distractors, at a basic perceptual level. In the work world, that may be similar to, for example, focusing better on the words in a document you are reading on the computer rather than getting sidetracked by all the pop-up windows, alerts, and so on from your devices.
But perhaps one of the greatest benefits of exercise to our productivity is that it helps our overall mental state immediately after we engage in it. Have you ever gone too long without eating and had strange things happen to your mood, your clarity of thought, your ability to focus, or your mental quickness? You were likely experiencing these changes in your mental state because your blood sugar had dropped.
It turns out that exercise helps to stabilize blood sugar levels too. Among type 2 diabetics—people who are at risk for dangerously high blood sugar levels —a single aerobic exercise session was found to drop blood sugar by 16 percent and keep it lower for about three hours. What that study helps to show is the specific and immediate impact just one exercise session can have on blood sugar levels—and on mental abilities. Exercise is also fantastic to reduce anxiety.
A meta-analysis—analyzing results from over one hundred studies— showed that aerobic exercise in the twenty-one to thirty-minute range was enough to reliably reduce anxious feelings in the period after exercising.
Positive emotions reliably increase after low or moderate exercise, but, surprisingly, not as much after more intense or longer sessions of exercise. Think of high intensity as jogging at a decent pace, breathing heavily, getting your heart rate up a bit, working up a good sweat, or more. Moderate intensity for many people, as I stated previously, is the equivalent of a very brisk walk or light jog, in which you work up a bit of a sweat, loosen up the aches and pains, and need to breathe a little more heavily than usual, but you certainly do not push your limits.
The research, in addition, suggests that this positive effect on emotions peaks within thirty minutes of exercising. So it seems that exercise is most useful when we need it most. Exercise Strategically As I wrote earlier, this strategy is not an argument for why you should exercise regularly for better overall health and perhaps, through that, become more productive.
Do you have to give a presentation, complete an important project, craft a strategically important document, or deliver a key customer proposal? Do you get nervous when interacting with clients? Do your check-in meetings with your boss or certain clients raise your anxiety level?
Does engaging in certain tasks—like doing tedious jobs, engaging in activities you feel you are not good at, or working with people whom you find difficult—bring down your mood? Do you have some multi-hour meetings after which you feel completely drained? Are there times of the day or week when you routinely feel tired or disengaged? Some moderate exercise at the right time can make the difference.
Exercise is like a reset button. It is a reliable, effective, and fast-acting strategy for improving your mental performance. Moderate exercise —vigorous enough for you to work up a sweat but not to feel spent—is a game changer in the hours immediately after you exercise. Walk very briskly for thirty to forty minutes. Go up and down the back stairs for ten or twenty minutes. Or if you belong to a gym nearby, take a break and exercise for twenty to thirty minutes on the treadmill, exercise bike, or your preferred machine.
The moderate physical activity may just sharpen your focus and mental agility. The exercise is likely to calm your nerves and improve your mood. If Nelson Mandela could run in place in his jail cell, you can get to a treadmill in the morning before your big meetings. So the next time you need to tackle an important task, consider whether your body, and not just your brain, may be the key to your success. One of them involves something you already do every day, even at work: eating and drinking.
What you eat and drink—and when—can have meaningful effects on your energy level, mood, and executive functions in the minutes and hours that follow. We are capable of impressive feats of comprehension, motivation, thinking, and performance when our brain and biological systems are functioning optimally.
Two Awesome Hours will show you how to be your most productive every day" Add another edition? Two awesome hours Josh Davis. Donate this book to the Internet Archive library. If you own this book, you can mail it to our address below.
Want to Read. View PDF 'Two awesome hours : strategies to harness your best time and get your most important work done' Warszawa, 20 - 26 listopada r. The answer is to create the conditions for two awesome hours of peak productivity per day. View PDF Two awesome hours. View PDF Two-hour parking limits where we can ride. It is also affordable, convenient to several major metropolitan areas within 3 hours, and friendl View PDF For two hours, I prayed for this special anointing, with no success.
He was making His presence and protection known in an awesome way, because of what was to come. View PDF Twenty hours of marketing services over a two month period. Awesome Website Guys. Awesome Myanma. Everyone jumps into vehicles and naps, eats and rests through the hour long storm. View PDF Only two hours' sleep.
The support is awesome. View PDF Mass was two hours, and the young people were totally engaged and inspired! It was an awesome experience for all of us. View PDF We have been able to get the process down to about a two hour job. Awesome trusted servants! View PDF We split into two groups that left three hours apart.
It was awesome. The data processing menu has two sections at the moment. View PDF Two hours later. Because that's an awesome movie. Which of the following words does not mean wonderful or awesome, tool, dope, tight?
0コメント