PERSONAL SPECIAL .....Top 10 Ways to Train Your Brain to Stay Focused

Top 10 Ways to Train Your Brain to Stay Focused

Attention is the most precious resource that we can leverage to actually get things done. The ability to focus intensely and for a longer period of time on one activity is undoubtedly essential to every person who wishes to attract abundance and results.

Our brain is a very complex mechanism that often works without our awareness. Our subconscious mind, the deep place where all our memories, feelings, and neuro-associations are stored can be our best friend or our worst enemy.

No matter what goals, profession, or work you are currently pursuing, a disciplined mind is critical for your success. For that reason, in today’s post, I’m sharing 10 effective ways to train your brain to stay focused and productive. Pay attention and apply!

1. Plan and Visualize a Few Critical Tasks Each Day

Our thoughts shape our reality. Why? Because our thoughts generate feelings, feelings lead to action, and action leads to results.

As a part of your morning routine, establish one to three critical tasks that must be done throughout the day. Don’t just think of them superficially. Visualize them and simulate the feelings you’ll get after finishing each task. If you truly think about your day’s success, your subconscious will do everything it can to help you turn thoughts into reality.

2. Find Your Peak Hours

Some people perform better during the day, while others do great during the night. To find your most productive hours — the “peak hours” — you should actively measure your productivity during various hours of the day.

Pay attention to your energy, thought patterns, distractions, motivation, and moods while experimenting different work hours. Make sure you allow at least a week to establish these peak hours. So, if you try to get your most important tasks done from 8 AM to 10 AM, experiment it for a week. Next week, focus your attention on critical tasks starting from 10 AM and ending at 12 PM.

3. Avoid Multitasking

Multitasking has been proven to reduce our cognitive abilities due to the fact that the brain can only fully focus on one task at a time. Even though multitasking can be beneficial in various situations, you should avoid it as much as you can whenever you deal with important tasks. Give your full attention to the task at hand to improve the quality and speed of work!

4. Treat Your Mind Like a Muscle

What do you do when you want to build muscles? You exercise. Not just once, but regularly. Training your brain to stay focused is a matter of practice. Every time you experience distracting thoughts, you have to acknowledge them for what they are — time and attention killers.

Whenever you feel like you “must stop working”, you should push it a little further. If you have big trouble focusing right now, you shouldn’t try to work for 60 minutes straight. Build your levels of focus gradually. First two weeks, try focusing for 20 minutes, take a 5-minute break, then go again. In two months, you should be able to stay focused for 60 minutes and get a lot of things done!

5. Build Willpower and Discipline

Very few of us are making real decisions. A decision is a deal with your mind that no matter what happens, your decision sticks. Therefore, when you say, “I should exercise”, you should immediately replace the “should” with “must”. Otherwise, your brain won’t take your intent seriously and it won’t “care” to help.

Willpower and self-discipline are two related traits that should be developed at the same time. Your willpower is the fuel of your actions. Your discipline is your ability to go past intrusive thoughts, comfort zone, and laziness.

Here’s what few people tell you: these skills require consistent practice, building them is not easy, and giving up is not an option.

6. Acknowledge Your Need to Avoid Pain and to Gain Pleasure

When we do something, we do it because we seek pleasure or because we want to avoid pain. Think about it — when students must do their homework, they procrastinate because their subconscious minds signal incoming pain. When the deadline is close, they’ll take action in order to avoid the pain of receiving a bad grade.

Take this example and synchronize it with your life. Every time you want to focus on a task, acknowledge your immediate response. Are you trying to avoid pain? Or you’re looking for pleasure? When you become the observer, you’ll be able to be in charge.

7. Avoid Distractions

You can’t train your brain to stay focused unless you ensure that your external environment also lacks distractions. Your phone, for example, should never disturb your attention. Turn off the notifications, say “NO” whenever someone interrupts you, and be committed to cut off every possible distraction around you.

8. Leverage the Power of Habits

If you build empowering habits, you’ll no longer have to use your motivation and willpower to become focused. Your mind will recognize the pattern and will make your job easier. For example — when you wash your teeth and face in the morning, you’re doing automatically without using any significant amounts of focus, energy, and motivation. Building productive habits is like teaching your brain how to behave at different yet specific times.

9. Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness implies self-awareness. Practicing mindfulness is nothing more than focusing your entire attention on the present moment. Your present thoughts and feelings, the environment that surrounds you, your breath, your heartbeat…you choose. It doesn’t matter what you focus on — as long as you’re “here”, “now”, your mind is present.

You can practice mindfulness in various situations: while reading, working, studying, washing dishes, walking in the park, and so on. When your focus is prioritized on what’s happening now, you’ll perform better in most of the situations.

10. Become Sovereign

Sovereignty is the practice of aligning your thoughts, emotions, and actions. Most people lack sovereignty, which means that their emotions aren’t in harmony with their thoughts, neither with their actions.

For example, if you want to read a book today but you instantly feel that this is going to be boring, you’ll never actually read that book. However, if you think of something and you get positive feelings as a reaction, taking action won’t be that difficult.

If you’re aware of this, you can easily implement it. As a result, staying focused on your responsibilities and work will become a piece of cake.

Takeaways

Improving your mind is everything. Until you let yourself be carried by your thoughts, immediate pleasures, fear, and pain, you will experience exactly what you “cultivate”. As they say, you reap what you sow.

This refers to the universal cause-and-effect principle, which suggests that every thought and feeling you experience and every action you take will generate an effect. Good or bad, that’s totally up to you.

https://medium.com/@FacileThings/top-10-ways-to-train-your-brain-to-stay-focused-dc702ea6ac19

TECH SPECIAL......Air-mobility solutions: What they’ll need to take off

Air-mobility solutions: What they’ll need to take off

February 2019 | Article

Innovators are designing air taxis and delivery drones. But these won’t take flight unless stakeholders accelerate investment in air-mobility infrastructure.

Traffic congestion forces US drivers to waste more than three billion gallons of fuel and keeps them trapped in their cars for almost seven billion extra hours each year.¹ Much of that time might involve dreaming of a trip to work that does not involve staring at taillights on the expressway. Could we reduce long drives by transporting people with large drones tailored for passenger transport? Air-mobility solutions could also improve the transportation of goods. Can we deliver prescription drugs within 20 minutes to elderly people who lack transportation or provide medevac services to remote locations? And what about sending groceries or food to areas with few stores?

Start-ups, high-tech giants, and others have already begun investing in the innovative technologies needed to make such delivery and transport drones a reality. But the wider use of air-mobility solutions also requires other enablers. Potential drone operators need to develop strong business cases that attract investors. Regulators will play a critical role in setting comprehensive guidelines for everything from vehicle requirements to airspace management. Industry stakeholders must educate the public to address core concerns about air mobility, including safety. Another important enabler—one that is often overlooked—involves infrastructure, a broad category that includes places where drones take off and land.

It’s easy to understand why infrastructure has received minimal attention. Air-mobility solutions themselves are so technically complex, and their potential use cases so fascinating, that they tend to command the most attention. But now, many companies and private investors have begun exploring the infrastructure assets required to make air mobility a reality. Companies that have engaged stakeholders in a dialogue about infrastructure include Amazon, which recently patented a flight-management system, and Uber Technologies, which has tried to determine the costs and requirements for various infrastructure assets—including the vertiports that will serve electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. On the government side, it seems that interest in infrastructure is also growing, with some public agencies investing in the development of air-mobility infrastructure for drone use cases. They’re also investigating how these systems can be integrated with the existing air-traffic-management system.

When companies and other stakeholders invest in infrastructure assets, they often face questions about their necessity, since air-mobility solutions still have many other hurdles to overcome. Wide availability of delivery drones is not expected for three to ten years, and it may be even longer before passenger-transport drones are deployed at scale. But the timelines for designing, constructing, and obtaining space for infrastructure, including vertiports, are also long, such that companies should begin planning now. If they hold back until air-mobility solutions are ready to hit the skies, their drones will be the aerial equivalent of a bridge to nowhere: expensive technologic marvels that serve no purpose.

To help investors, private companies, and the public sector avoid this outcome and quickly capture potential benefits once the technologies are ready, we identified infrastructure requirements in the critical US market. These include traffic-management infrastructure, physical infrastructure for receiving packages or landing vehicles, and supporting technology infrastructure, such as automatic doors for admitting drones into warehouses.

The role of unmanned traffic management

The most mature unmanned-aerial-systems (UAS) applications—and the only ones where drones are widely used in either the corporate or the consumer sector—involve short-range surveillance and associated photographs or videos. During these flights, drone operators can identify obstacles and redirect the flight path as needed, since the vehicles always remain within their visual line of sight. All drones that travel further distances require unmanned traffic management (UTM), a system of radar, beacons, flight-management services, communication systems, and servers that coordinate, organize, and manage all UAS traffic in the airspace. Within the private sector, companies had attracted more than $350 million in funding to create UTM and associated navigation systems by 2017, but these are still in the pilot phase.

For UAS that do not fly more than 400 feet above ground level, UTM serves a purpose similar to the air-traffic-management system for traditional aviation. It directs flight paths and prevents collisions between UAS and obstacles, such as buildings, other drones, and aircraft (interactive). Other important capabilities involve providing information in real time (or close to it) to help air-mobility solutions avoid severe weather, congestion, and prohibited airspace.

By Tyler Duvall, Alastair Green, Meredith Langstaff, and Kayla Miele

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-infrastructure/our-insights/air-mobility-solutions-what-theyll-need-to-take-off?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck&hlkid=7c5a3ebd6ac04515ab939b1c56cca9f7&hctky=1627601&hdpid=0b119905-64fa-45dc-ae62-ccdeee515e7d

TRAVEL SPECIAL ...HEAR THE MUSIC

TRAVEL AND HEAR THE MUSIC

Let the rhythms move you while following the beats of rock 'n' roll, EDM, soul, hip-hop and the blues in five exciting U.S. destinations

ROCK 'N' ROLL AUSTIN, TEXAS

Rock 'n' roll is legendary in a city known as the "Live Music Capital of the World." Listen to some of the city's 2,000 musicians in the Sixth Street and South Congress districts.

GoUSA.in/Austin

HIP-HOP NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Follow the roots of raps, rhymes and breakdancing in hip-hop's birthplace. No immersion is complete without a Hush Hip-Hop Tour or seeing artists at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

GoUSA.in/NewYorkCity

SOUL LOUISIANA

In the place jazz was born, Louisiana musicians found inspiration in gospel, piano-fueled boogie-woogie and R&B. Hear the sound of soul in New Orleans, Lafayette and Baton Rouge.

GoUSA.in/Louisiana

EDM DENVER, COLORADO

Watch EDM's top performers and DJs enchant audiences under the stars at the famed Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre, then dance all night in Denver's hottest clubs.

GoUSA.in/Denver

BLUES CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Tour Historic Chess Records, where musicians like Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon perfected the Chicagostyle blues sound in the 1950s.Today, hear it at Buddy Guy's Legends, Rosa's Lounge and Kingston Mines.

GoUSA.in/Chicago

Aloe Blacc entertains in Washington, D.C.

LISTEN UP

Discover more places behind the music while sampling Spotify playlists inspired by the USA.

GoUSA.in/music

BOOK SPECIAL ......5 Simple Tips To Learn Much More From The Books You Read

5 Simple Tips To Learn Much More From The Books You Read

If there’s one habit that almost all high-performers share, it’s that they read books. A lot of books. Books truly hold the power to accelerate your personal growth and take your life to the next level. I have to admit, without the business and self-help section of Amazon I wouldn’t be where I am today.

However, there is something very important that most people get wrong when it comes to reading. You see, it’s not really about how many books you read, it’s about how you read them. It’s quality over quantity.

The truth is, most people read in a very ineffective way, without even realizing it. They forget most of what they read and only retain a small part of the valuable lessons that their books contain. Most people focus more on the number of books instead of how much knowledge they actually retain and implement per book they read. And that’s a shame, as they could get so much more out of a book by applying just a few simple tips..

Tip 1: Highlight Important Sentences and Paragraphs

By highlighting something, you tell your brain that it should pay attention to that particular segment and therefore you tend to remember it better. Personally, I highlight every single useful piece of advice that I come across. This way, I’m forced to take a few seconds to really analyze the lesson or piece of advice and let it fully sink in.

If you just rush through the book without highlighting or giving yourself a break to let the information sink in, you simply won’t remember a lot of what you’ve read. You could as well be doing something different with your time.

Tip 2: Take Notes Of The Most Valuable Lessons

Besides highlighting important sentences and paragraphs, I noticed that actually writing down the most valuable lessons (in my own words) is one of the best ways to memorize and internalize the information.

I don’t just blindly copy the exact sentences as it’s written by the author. Rather, I try to write it in my own words so that I really make sure I understand the information and that I can relate it to my own personal situation.

For my note-taking process, I prefer to use SmartMarks as they’re easy to use and you can conveniently put them between your book. This way you’ll never lose your notes or forget to take them with you (which used to happen to me all the time before I started using SmartMarks).

In my opinion, taking notes and re-writing the most valuable lessons in your own words is key in accelerating your personal growth. Yes, it may take some time, but it’s definitely worth going the extra mile as you’ll retain a lot more knowledge this way.

Tip 3: Summarize The Entire Book

Based on the highlights and the notes that I gathered, I create a summary of the book. I make sure this summary is crafted in such a way that I can easily link the lessons to my own situation. Of course, I won’t summarize every single chapter that I read, as that would be a waste of time. Instead, I base my summary on the lessons and insights that I found to be highly important (aka, the ones I highlighted and written down in my notes).

Yes, this takes about an hour of extra work, but the time investment is well worth it. Firstly, by making a summary of a book you retain much more of the knowledge, as you go over the most important lessons once again. Secondly, by making a summary you create an awesome tool that helps you access information about a specific topic very quickly. For example, instead of flipping through the entire book (which is often not even possible as I work remotely), I now only have to open the book summary on Google Drive and search for the keywords that I’m looking for. This way, I can easily gather information for when I’m writing a new blogpost or book, or for when I need to solve a challenging business problem. So, although it may take me about an hour to summarize the entire book, I save much more time in the long run because of it.

Tip 4: Recap Every Chapter

After reading a chapter, don’t just quickly rush to the next chapter or put the book away. Instead, take anywhere from 1–5 minutes to recap the chapter (in your mind) you just read. This way, you’ll make sure you process the information much more effectively. If you go to the next chapter too quickly — or if you pick up another activity right after reading a chapter, it’s very likely that you won’t remember a lot about what you’ve just learned. Your brain needs a little while to put all the information in the right place, and taking just a few minutes to recap the last chapter will help you do so.

Tip 5: Take Action On The Material

This is by far the most important tip that I can give you when it comes to learning more and accelerating your personal growth as fast as possible. It truly surprises me how many people just read a book and then never take action on it (or only just a tiny bit).

Though I must admit, that’s also what I did at the beginning of my personal development journey. I read many books about anything from success habits to building an online business, and I would feel amazing because of all this ‘knowledge’ I had gained. Yet, in reality, I was still broke and I didn’t achieve any of the goals that I had set for myself (not even close). I was a knowledge junkie who merely consumed, consumed and consumed. I thought more knowledge would be the answer to my problems, but it definitely wasn’t.

Do you know what was the answer? More action. Instead of being a knowledge junkie, I decided to become an action junkie and actually take action upon all the valuable lessons that I gained. Only after I made that decision did I start to see real results, progress and growth. I actually achieved some of the goals I had set for myself, and I felt a lot more confident and knowledgable as I actually knew how things worked in reality — and not just in theory.

Keep in mind, authors put months, years or even a lifetime of experience into just 200–300 pages..

What would be possible for you and your life if you actually started to do what the author said?

What would be possible if you’d actually do the exercises that 90% of readers skip?

And if you’d actually follow the advice and tactics of the author?

Well, if it’s a good book and a credible author, you could actually start to achieve amazing things in life. And that’s what I want for you.

If you like to read a lot of books, but hardly take action upon the things you read, I’d highly encourage you to make a list of 1–10 actions that you’re going to take based on the book that you’re currently reading. That’s exactly why I designed my own book ‘Stop Procrastinating’ in such a way that it is action focused. At the end of every chapter, I encourage you to take action upon the things you’ve just read so that you actually make progress and achieve more.

Remember, only by taking action will you be able to see the results that you desire — and make your goals and dreams a reality instead of keeping it a fantasy.

Now Do It

As an action point, implement at least 3 of the tips of this article with the book that you’re currently reading. Highlight the important lessons, make notes and re-write them in your own words, summarize the book, mentally recap each chapter and (last but not least) take massive action upon the lessons you’ve learned. That’s the way you’ll learn much more from the books that you read :)

Jari Roomer

https://medium.com/personal-growth-lab/5-simple-tips-to-learn-much-more-from-the-books-you-read-25b738579ae0

INNOVATION SPECIAL..... The 2 most innovative companies in the world today are changing how hundreds of millions of Asian consumers buy food, book hotels, and (a lot) more

The 2 most innovative companies in the world today are changing how hundreds of millions of Asian consumers buy food, book hotels, and (a lot) more

The “transactional super app” is transforming local businesses across Asia as well, digitizing their operations and fueling their growth and expansion.

50 MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES

In the first half of 2018, Meituan Dianping—a Chinese tech platform that expedites the booking and delivery of services such as food, hotel stays, and movie tickets—facilitated 27.7 billion transactions (worth $33.8 billion) for more than 350 million people in 2,800 cities. That’s 1,783 Meituan-enabled services every second of every day, with each customer using it an average of three times a week.

Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, Grab, the Singapore-based ride-hailing company, forced Uber out of the region in 2018 and acquired its local operations. A few months later, it expanded its app to offer its 130 million users not only food delivery and travel booking, but also financial and other services. These efforts helped Grab hit $1 billion in revenue in 2018 and attract more than $3 billion in fresh funding to expand. Later this year, it’ll add healthcare services from Ping An, the Chinese digital health giant.

Both Meituan and Grab are what’s known as transactional super apps, amalgamations of lifestyle services that connect hundreds of millions of customers to local businesses. “We want to help millions move through the economy and up the social ladder,” says Grab cofounder Hooi Ling Tan. They may not be well known in the U.S., but Meituan and Grab are changing the lives of hundreds of millions of consumers and millions of merchants with highly complex operations disguised as simple transactions—elegant tech to enable real-world experiences.

Meituan, which views food as its core offering, is skilled at leveraging its data regarding users’ consumption habits, including price sensitivity, to recommend other things they’ll like. “Our strategy in integrating different businesses,” says Xia Huaxia, Meituan’s chief scientist, “is to attract a large volume of users with high-frequency services, and then push forward some low- and medium-frequency ones like haircuts and marriage services.” Grab uses transportation data to figure out what services to roll out next. “We’ve been bringing users to these businesses,” Tan says. “Now they can come to you.”

Success for a transactional super app requires what Xia calls “a culture of long-term patience.” Meituan is competing fiercely with Alibaba, and although its revenue in the first half of 2018 was $3.8 billion, the company has sustained significant losses as it pursues its vision. Grab is fighting with another startup, Go-Jek, in parts of Southeast Asia. In its effort to win, Grab has opted to partner with the likes of Toyota, Microsoft, and Mastercard rather than build everything itself. “We can be smarter and faster by making the platform more open,” says Tan.

Efficiency also drives innovation. Meituan’s Smart Dispatch system, introduced in 2015, schedules which of its 600,000 motorbike riders will deliver the millions of food orders it fulfills daily. It now calculates 2.9 billion route plans every hour to optimize a rider’s ability to pick up and drop off up to 10 orders at once in the shortest time and distance. Since Smart Dispatch launched, it has reduced average delivery time by more than 30%, and riders complete 30 orders a day, up from 20, increasing their income.

Uber was once poised to popularize the transactional super app. Instead, Meituan and Grab—and the companies emulating them globally, from Swiggy in India to Rappi, in Latin America—are leapfrogging ahead to build a new model for the service economy for billions of people.

BY DAVID LIDSKY

https://www.fastcompany.com/90298866/meituan-grab-most-innovative-companies-2019

HEALTH SPECIAL .....Four reasons why you need to keep an eye on your screen-time

Four reasons why you need to keep an eye on your screen-time

Staring at digital screens for more than seven hours a day is changing our bodies and possibly even our brains

Most of us stare at screens all day, but this comes with consequences. Screens are changing our bodies and possibly even our brains.

It’s 11 pm. You should be asleep. But you’re watching a video on your phone. Tomorrow, you’ll wake up and go to work, where you’ll stare at your computer for eight hours. When you get home, you’ll watch a movie on TV. And if you’re anything like the average adult, you spend more than seven hours a day staring at digital screens.

Computer Vision Syndrome

So, what’s all this screen time actually doing to your body and brain? Humans didn’t evolve to stare at bright screens all day. And our eyes are suffering the consequences. An estimated 58 per cent of people who work on computers experience what’s called Computer Vision Syndrome.

It’s a series of symptoms that include:

• Eyestrain • Blurred vision

• Headaches • Neck and back pain

Nearsightedness

And long-term, this amount of screen time could be damaging our vision permanently. Since 1971, cases of nearsightedness in the US have nearly doubled, which some scientists partly link to increased screen time. And in Asia today, nearly 90 per cent of teens and adults are nearsighted. But it’s not just the brightness of our screens that affect us.

Disruption of circadian rhythms

A problem occurs when we use our screens at night. Typically, when the sun sets, we produce the hormone melatonin. This hormone regulates our circadian rhythms, helping us feel tired and fall asleep. But studies have found that blue light from screens can disrupt this process.

Effect on kids

But perhaps the most concerning changes from all this screen time is in kids’ brains. An ongoing study supported by the NIH (USA) has found that some pre-teens who clocked over seven hours a day on screens had differences in a part of their brains called the cortex. That’s the region responsible for processing information from our five senses.

Scientists aren’t sure what this could mean for how the kids learn and behave later in life. But the same data also showed that kids who spent more than two hours a day on screens scored lower on thinking and language skill tests. Only time will tell what other changes are on the horizon for humankind.

businessinsider.in

TOI 3MAR19