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Chapter 4: How to Will Yourself to Focus

Pursuing Single Tasks and Improving Productivity

Multi-tasking is often associated with being productive, but now it has become a way of life. It’s not really a productive way of working. For one, it makes you inefficient for having to switch between tasks. It can complicate things, as you suffer from stress and commit errors. It can also make you insane as you deal with the chaos of multi-tasking, when your brain is designed only to handle one thing.

That’s why it’s best to settle with single tasks. Your mind will be focused on one thing and one thing alone. Imagine how joyful it would be to savor one task, such as reading a novel, eating breakfast, or spending time with your family.

This will also benefit you in that you can focus better, improve your effectiveness, develop your expertise in what you do, and produce quality work. It also feels good to lose yourself in something that you feel is worth doing.

You can lead a life full of single tasks by doing these things:

* Be aware of the things that you are doing, right from when you start doing it. Stop yourself from switching to another thing.

Eliminate distractions. If you’re going to research, focus on it alone. If you’re going to read a book, do nothing except read the book.

Choose your tasks wisely. Always ask yourself “Am I doing something worthwhile?” If not, proceed with the important tasks.

Pour your everything into the task at hand. If you’re going to talk with friends, talk and listen. If you’re going to lose weight, eat healthy and exercise as much as you can.

Practice. Once you get your drive going, practice it every single day until you’re good at it.

But how can you boost your productivity if you choose single tasks?

Choose only the biggest and most important tasks every day, the ones that you really need to finish to create an impact on your work and life in general.

Don’t go straight to your distractions first thing in the morning. Instead, prepare a to-do list.

Get rid of distractions.

Finish your tasks one by one.

Stop yourself when you feel the temptation to check your inbox or log into your social network accounts.

Don’t stop doing the most important tasks until they’re done.

Take note of things that you can’t do now or think of doing later so you won’t forget them.

Take a break and de-stress by breathing deeply in and out.

Benefits of Smaller Work Focus

Granted that you now know a bit about how to focus, you still have a lot of work to do. For starters, you need to narrow down your focus.

It’s not right to work with a broad focus. This could be overcommitting to too many projects at once, trying to please all of your customers, doing everything for everybody, being available for contact all the time in both online and offline channels, and more.

Instead, you need to narrow your focus by identifying your priorities. Let go of one unnecessary task at a time. Do less. Include fewer features. Learn to say no to some people’s requests. Accept that you can’t please everybody. Focus on fewer things, things that do matter.

How to Focus on Reading and Research

You can do more work, especially with work that involves a lot of reading and research, if you know how to avoid distractions when you’re reading. So, how can you focus on long blogs or articles?

To finish long reading materials without being interrupted frequently, put your reading material in a separate window without any other tabs open. Expand that window to cover the rest of the screen and show the blog or article on your computer screen alone. Don’t switch to other windows or programs until you’re done reading.

Do the same thing with books. Hold your book and put your computer, laptop or any other mobile device out of your sight. Read in a quiet place and enjoy the experience.

When you do research, don’t open your emails, social networks, and irrelevant windows, tabs or programs. Search about the topic that you’re interested in and open the web pages that you found. Skim these pages and open the relevant links. Repeat these with the new online sources. Open all the necessary articles then read them one by one. Take notes after reading each article and bookmark some. This will help you focus when you do research, despite being online.
Benefits of Walking on Disconnection and Focus

Did you know that you can boost your productivity immensely by walking, aside from staying healthy and slim?

You can follow this walking routine to help you regain your focus:

Walk for about 30 minutes to a destination - a library, park, coffee shop, or cafe. Don’t connect online.

Read or work for 40 minutes, from writing and reading to taking notes or responding to emails. You can insert some snacking in there too.

Repeat this schedule.

Walking and disconnecting are worth trying because you can refocus and can think better after sitting all day long. It will also help you clear your head, enjoy what nature has to offer, and take a break from stress. It will even help you improve physically. After walking, you’ll know how to focus on work again and waste less time on distractions.

Chapter 5: How People with Various Roles Can Focus

How Parents Can Find Focus

A parent’s life is never quiet! You have kids demanding, screaming, squealing, crying, and playing at home, so it’s even more difficult for parents to find focus and peace of mind.

One way to get focus to work for your life as parents is to separate your roles. Assign them to different days or weeks and focus on each role one at a time. For instance, you have to wake up early in the morning before the kids wake up and focus on yourself. Run, jog, walk, read a book, do yoga, or indulge in your creative side by drawing or writing.

Once the kids wake up, prepare them for school while you prepare for work, pack lunches, and more. But this time, focus on being a parent and give time to talk to your kids.

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Chapter 7: The Trick Is in Avoiding the Wrong Things

Summary

Avoidance is the best way to keep stress-free. Keep away from all those stress-boosters and you will have busted it already!

The Trick Is in Avoiding the Wrong Things

Temptation is a very easy thing to happen to everyone. It seems very appealing at the start, but very soon it begins showing its true colors. That is when you see that you cannot tackle it all that simply. That is when the stress begins to creep in.

Just take a very simple example, which most of us will easily relate with. Think about a delicious gourmet delight. You know that it will be great to eat but at the same time you know that it is laden with calories. Very few people can avoid such a treat. They will very likely gobble it. They will become uncontrollable whenever any such food comes their way. The result is that they start piling on weight. Health problems begin to raise their ungainly head.

But if you had made it a point to avoid the sinful food right from the start, all these problems of obesity and the related issues including the high stress would not have arisen at all. Today you are dealing with the stress that you have become overweight and that weight does not dwindle, but had you learnt the fine art of avoiding things, you would have been in much better shape today. This stress that you currently have would not have been a part and parcel of your life.

Temptations come in our way in various forms. Food is just a very simple example; it can come in our way in various complicated manners. A raise for a difficult job is an example. The job given to you is difficult, you know that you aren't capable of it but still you didn't avoid taking the job. You plunged headlong into it, with the lucre of the added money and the chance to rise above the competition. But just because you didn't say "no" to something you know wouldn't be able to accomplish.

Saying "no" is a fine art. You have to be firm in your decision but at the same time be polite and gentle. It is always best to speak about your own limitation when you are refusing something. If you do that, you assure the person that nothing is wrong with their offer. You are leaving the gate open for them to return with something that better suits your mutual equation.

Chapter 8: Looking for Relaxation Techniques

Summary

Various relaxation techniques exist for stress management, and they really work.

Looking for Relaxation Techniques

For most people, stress management means to use a relaxation technique. Relaxation in itself is a way of working out your stress. When we are stressed, the level of hormones in our body increases. Under periods of extreme stress, three main hormones are released in a high amount - cortisol, norepinephrine and the growth hormone. As long as the level of these hormones is high, we continue to be under stress. The one sure way to relieve ourselves of the onslaught of stress is to bring the level of these hormones back to normal. This is achieved through using the right relaxation techniques. That is the reason we called relaxation "unwinding" - we are bringing hormonal levels back to what they were initially.

There are several relaxation techniques available to us today. Here we discuss some of the most conventional and effective ones.

Yoga

Yoga has received an important place in the world's health scenario today. You could make use of this ancient Indian science as well. Through the use of various bodily stances, known as asanas, yoga tries to act on various energy points of the body. It releases the latent energies of the body and makes it more energetic, fitter and much healthier. The popularity of yoga has reached into the West a long time ago and now it is very easy to find books, videos, manuals and a lot other educational stuff on how to perform these techniques. Yoga could very well be your ticket out of the persistent stress that's playing on your mind.

Breathing Exercises

Breathing works because you are channelizing a flow of healthy oxygen into your lungs, which is then carried over by the bloodstream to different organs of the body, including the brain. There are various kinds of breathing exercises advised, some of which can give quick relief to the person using them. Check out these breathing exercises on the Internet, or visit your local bookstore to find a lot of books written by expert authors who write on health and fitness.

Meditation

Since stress is a mental problem, meditation can work wonders. The right meditation - whatever form of it you practice - can free your mind from its excess baggage and make it work optimally. Meditation can be practiced anywhere and there are only a few things that are needed in order to perform it effectively. Like the other two methods, there is a lot of information available on meditative processes as well.

Chapter 9: Prioritizing

Summary

If you always keep in mind that Wednesday precedes Thursday, you will be fine.

Prioritizing

A lot of our problems can be solved only if we would learn how to prioritize things. Our lives aren't simple, linear things. There are various intersections, crossroads, junctions and forks as we travel on the path called life. There will be various places where we will have to choose between two or sometimes several options. We will have to decide what we must do in precedence to others. There will be moral, social, familial and personal dilemmas and we will be torn by different emotions at the same time, making it quite difficult for us to choose what to do first.

The first important step for you to realize in such circumstances is that you are just one individual; it is impossible for you to do several things simultaneously. You might be able to multitask a bit, but you cannot do it with a lot of tasks at once and you certainly cannot do it all the time.

This is where you need to prioritize. When you realize that you aren't physically or mentally capable of doing everything that life sets up in your platter, you will be happier and much more at ease with the fact that you have to do things on a priority basis.

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Chapter 5: Finding The Unity Mentality

In the first glance, you will think that to promote unity is not something that can be possibly achieved by a company, a community or a group. But, for a person with sincerity regarding this matter, even those things that are indeed impossible to achieve will be possible. All you have to do is to develop the right mindset for this time and that is the unity mentality.

You don’t have to go somewhere to find this way of thinking and it is because it comes within you...from your heart. The willingness to see and feel unity that lives within your heart is one thing that will help develop unity mentality.

Look at the other members of your group, and observe their behaviors. Do you notice any of them how possibly has this state of mind? You are very lucky if you have even one or two. They can help you a lot in making those self serving members of the team to become people with unity mentality.

So what are you still waiting for? Make a move now and be determined to achieve your goal.

Chapter 6: Practicing Unity

So you are now very7 serious of making your community or group united and strong. There are ways to get there and achieving this goal will never be hard for you to do if you know the right steps to take. To give you a jumpstart, here are some of the ways on how you can promote unity.
How to Promote Unity?

For sure, all of the benefits that unity can offer will push you to motivate your buddies and make them understand why they need to value unity. Now, you need to proceed on learning how to promote unity.

Promoting unity is a very vital part of supervising any successful organization comprised of three or more members. Sharing common beliefs and having a sense of a typical purpose are important for unifying a group of coworkers, members of an organization or sports players. To establish a sense of unity could help your group attain the set goals more effectively.

Here are the crucial steps that you should follow in promoting unity:

Develop a Universal Objective

To have a common and clearly defined objective will allow your team to know the direction you desire to creep up. Gather the members of your group and ask everybody what their thought of the shared objective is, if applicable.

Write down every idea given and validate each. Determine if there’s a universal thread. Choose your common aim and set up parameters like the date the objective must be attained.

Organize Team-Building Activities

Depending on kind of organization, team-building activities could become a fun and lighthearted way of promoting a sense of cooperation and unity. You may organize a set of activities that will be exciting and great for everybody.

Uphold Open Communication

You need to encourage every member of your organization to communicate honestly and openly. To encourage a sense of cooperation and unity, each member of the team should feel that he or she is appreciated and acknowledged. When people have objections or recommendations regarding the group’s activities or operation, you must permit them to voice these issues inside an open forum without judgment and criticism. You can do it in a public discussion setting wherein everybody can point out their concerns or contribute recommendations within a team or have an open-door rule, making the group members know that they can always have the chance to discuss the issues privately.

Observe Important Events

Celebrating some important events as a group could also help you in promoting a sense of oneness inside of your organization. You can arrange a small celebration to rejoice these events. Plan the party accordingly and you must make it a cheerful and festive occasion. You may buy some decors and hand out flyers to announce the upcoming party.

Problem Solving

You must be responsible enough in addressing any problem that will arise. Nothing will kill a group’s sense of unity quickly than ignoring the problems. Give time to address the problems and concerns of the members of the group as it makes them feel that you care and that you are committed to encouraging cooperation and unity.

Tips to Follow on Improving Your Team’s Unity

Once you have seen that everyone in the group starts valuing and showing care for one another, you should not let your team’s unity last for a while. It must be kept forever. Here are some tips to follow on how you can effectively improve your team’s unity:

Have an external function - all it takes to make unity last forever is to have an external function to escape from the sport. In that way, every member will be able to know well everybody on an individual level instead of simply as a group member level.

Have a fundraising project - one of the activities where you can definitely see everyone in your team happy is a fundraising project. It could be simple as a car wash or it can be something that is more intense such as a camp. Just prefer an activity that is team oriented which you know will make money for the group and be sure to include every member of the team to work as a group.

Team building sports - let all members of the group have fun. You may arrange some team games instead of individual games. Such games will require every member to work together. With these games, everybody will be forced to join, have fun and work together as a group.

Team drills - when the members of the run through drills and warm ups, just make sure that they are all doing the activity7 as a group. Things such as running, lining up or leaving together are teaching everyone indirectly the importance of unity.

Team punishments - if somebody happened to make a mistake or violation then the team will need to decide what kind of punishment should be given as a consequence. This will not only force everyone to follow the rules through peer pressure but it will help you have a better and more united team as well.

Improve communication - ensure that communication is vivid between the coaches and team members. Have open door policies or stand ups as it will help in alleviating confusion while it opens the closed doors for improved communication among the group involving the coaches.

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Chapter 4: Social Problems

Socialization is a very important element in every individual’s life. However, not all people get to realize its importance. With everyone’s lifestyle becoming more and more busy, it can be quite a luxury to have an effective socialization with your friends. This is especially true to those people who are too addicted to video games. People who are gaming addicted should be aware that too much playing of these games results to some social problems. Identify them immediately to quickly address them accordingly.

Addictive Gaming Affects Your Social Health

Your mobile phone starts ringing and you quickly rush to check who the one calling is. It is your best buddy. He probably likes to do some outdoor activities and hang out with you. Anyway, it is Saturday. You consider picking up the phone, yet rather decide not to. Rather, you tell yourself “/ will call him the moment I end this level”. You promise to yourself that you will call him since even though you attend to similar school and go most of similar classes together, you have not really get together for quite some time. You simply have become too busy. Therefore, you make a promise to yourself that, “the moment I finish...”

People who become addicted to online gaming come across similar situations most of the time and there are instances in which they need to choose if they will interact with their real world or carry on living inside the virtual one. Unfortunately, the real world hardly ever wins.

Social problems have become an extremely real portion of gaming addiction. Addicted gamers are spending a lot of time in playing their favorite games through which their personal relationships become neglected and sometimes, even disappear at once. Among all addicted married gamers, as much as 50% report the strain within their marriage because of their addiction.

A swift online information search regarding online gaming addiction will result to a number of stories about disturbing and possibly dangerous social decisions players have created as gaming becomes a priority above anything else. One of these stories was regarding a man who has installed the online gaming system into his laptop, allowing him to play even at work, although he is completely aware that being caught may mean being fired. However, another story was told by a wife who has a husband who starts playing literally “all the time” since he said that it helped him ease his mind from too much thinking of problems.

It is not simply neglect that put risks on the relationships of addicted gamers. Few of them have even talked a lot about their choice of games, to the extent of the elimination of everything else, allowing people not to want to be with them any longer. They won’t or can’t participate into the conversations in the real world or become a source of encouragement or support to family and friends. While their friends are talking about other things, they start to feel being left out that in return leads them to feel offended or irritated. It does not happen to them that they have chosen to become left out as they choose to devote most of or rather all their time to playing their fantasy games.

Few of the physical problems brought by video gaming addiction might result to social issues as well. For example, an addicted gamer who get inadequate sleep due to too much playing simply does not have the needed energy to use to deal with relationships. Having lack of sleep might also let an active gamer feel irritable and hard to be around with.

Haring insufficiency on social interaction which roots from excessive gaming might also have some long term social consequences. For instance, an addicted teen will not develop efficient social skills that will obstruct his capability to maintain and develop healthy rapports during his college years and onwards. Suddenly, he is 21 but has some social abilities of a 15 year old. He does not know how to make and deal with friends, conserve with opposite sex, or simply hang out and have fun with the company of other people. The social hindrances produced by the gaming addiction isolationism, sadly, feed continuously the addiction. A gaming addict would tend to go back to his virtual world in which relationships are simpler and are willingly waits for him.

Addiction to gaming can be very serious. Even though there are still several debates whether or not it is a diagnosable condition, there is apparently a part of the society for those people who consider gaming as more than a simple and casual pastime. Those people need family members and friends who truly care to interfere and attempt to help them put an end to the continuous gaming addictive cycle.

Chapter 5: Physical Problems

Addiction to video gaming affects the health of a person to a high level. Usually, it is very hard to treat the symptoms that are caused by nonstop gaming. What’s even worse is that excessive and incessant gaming may lead to some physical problems. Indeed, aside from social issues, too much gaming may result to certain physical problems.

Excessive Gaming Leads To Physical Problems

You have been looking for it all day. You have gone through and traveled a very long way, sometimes going over and over to ensure that you have not missed anything. A few areas are highly infested with aggressive creatures that you have been obstructed to continue on your journey not until those creatures have been destroyed. After going through all the challenges along the way, you have finally found the thing that you are looking for. It is the secret channel that brings you to the other place. You have moved up to another level. You get very excited that you never notice that you are feeling some backaches nor do you realize that you are on the edge of acquiring some migraine headache again.

This story' might sound a bit strange, but it is all too familiar for those video gaming players who are commonly called gamers. Whether they are playing online or on Xbox, they get into the gaming world that is full of elves,

dragons, witches and a lot more, as they travel to such mysterious and most times secret locations. Gamers spend most of their time within this “other” world that they start to provide some physical damages to their bodies.

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Chapter 7 Decide The Best Route To Take

Synopsis

If you want your emotions to be balanced, one of the things that you need to do is to decide on the perfect route that you need to take. Here, you have think wisely to and this chapter will give you some idea about it.

Many people tend to assume that emotions only happen to you and just like storms, the best that you can do is to just wait until these completely pass.

Change of Routes Helps Your Emotions

However, unlike those climatic storms, you can actually influence or even alter your emotions with no need to resort to different unhealthy methods such as drugs or alcohol. Having the ability to influence or manage your emotions can be a powerful marker to achieve good health, an emotional maturity as well as overall happiness.

Instead of letting yourself be swallowed up in your emotions, the perfect thing that you can do is decide on the right route that you need to take. It means that you need to find some diversions. For instance, when you feel bored or flat, just sitting in front of the TV with its uninteresting show will only worsen things. Instead, switch this off and go for a walk around your neighborhood. A breath of fresh air can help a lot in inevitably changing your mood.

If you feel angry, you can focus on the three essential things in your life that you feel grateful. In case you are anxious, you can imagine that the thing that makes you anxious has already took place and has gone much better than what you expect.

Controlling your emotions is possible and it is even made easier when you are able to pinpoint the right route that you should take. All you need is to think or do something entirely different. Never be passively carried along by your present emotion and instead, let your mind work properly to steer you towards the right path.

Chapter 8 Learn To Be Happy With Yourself

Synopsis

The last but definitely not the least thing that you have to do in order to achieve optimum emotional balance is to learn how to be happy with yourself. Of course, your emotions will never be put in their right places when you yourself are not happy and satisfied in your own skin. In this last chapter, you will learn some easy ways on how to embrace happiness within yourself.

Did you ever find yourself standing in front of the mirror feeling hateful and resentful of yourself? Do you really understand how it is to be totally disgusted with yourself, feeling the longing for changes?

There are times when you feel upset about something and you allow the circumstances and environment to dictate whether you will be happy or not. But the stark truth is that if you live your life with happiness and choose what you will do all that it takes so that you can be happy, it is very possible for you to be happy when you put your mind to it.

Easy Steps Towards Your Own Happiness

Happiness is something that you have to do on purpose. Even in the middle of difficulties and struggles, you have to choose to be happy. It is not something that comes from having things or money for the truth is, happiness stems from within you and you alone. Being happy with yourself simply means that you have to show mercy to yourself, forgive yourself, befriend yourself, accept yourself, and last but not the least, love yourself.

It is a lifetime journey that calls for regular self examination as well as a continuous process of making peace with yourself. It is all about discovering the things that make you unhappy and opting to live in true peace. This means that you treat yourself with kindness and compassion. This makes you start to enjoy your life even more, celebrating this to be a peaceful adventure. This helps you to live your life to the fullest, allowing you to make the whole world a much better place not only for you but also for others.

However, learning to be happy with yourself might be among the trickiest challenges that are going to face. For some people, such challenges can be too hard to handle, which is why they just let these rule their lives. There are also those who endure challenges but some choose to overcome them yet they do not have any idea how to do it.

If you want to be happy with yourself, here are some things that can help you out:

Self Forgiveness

You have to forgive yourself for having negative thoughts. Forgive yourself for not thinking twice and for talking. Forgive yourself for showing rudeness to your superior, parents, friends and siblings. Never think of negative thoughts about yourself for the wrong decisions or wrong steps. It is a type of thinking that will put your focus on the issue and not on the solution. It will be best that you say good things regarding yourself instead of saying negative things. Say positive things to yourself for it will be a sign that you already forgave yourself.

Don’t Talk and Think about Your Issues

Try to focus instead on the good in all situations that you face and all persons that you have relationships with, which include yourself.

Forgive Other People

If you like to make peace with other people, forgive, forget and learn to let go of the things that happened in the past. Holding grudges and resenting is never good. To forgive easily, assume that they did no cause offense to you in the first place.

Be Busy

When you are busy, you will have less time to think particularly of someone or something that cause your negative feelings. Getting your hands full will keep the negative thoughts from triggering you over and over again.

Be a Blessing to Other People

Get your thoughts off yourself and instead, focus on being a blessing to those around you. Being a blessing to others results to more blessings coming back to you. This is an amazing phenomenon that not all people understand. Remember that life is not about receiving but more of giving.

Develop a Hobby

You can choose to spend your free time on listening to movies, reading, watching movies and other kinds of activities. These will help take your mind off the issues in your life and thoughts that you have concerning yourself.