It’s a common problem these days: switching between browser tabs and apps on your phone, checking social media and messages and email, thinking about the million things you have to do but putting them off … Anything but staying focused on one task at a time.
Author: Leo Babauta
Leo Babauta is a simplicity blogger & author. He created Zen Habits, a Top 25 blog with a million readers. He’s also a best-selling author, a husband, father of six children, and a vegan. In 2010 moved from Guam to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he leads a simple life.
Single-Minded Devotion to a Task
I’m going to share a secret to productivity, happiness and mindfulness that you can practice right now, and every day: Devote yourself single-mindedly to anything you do.
Starting, Over and Over Again
I know from my own experience, and coaching thousands of others, that habits and projects are a messy affair. We get good at building and maintaining 5-6 habits, or we get off to an amazing start with a new project, and then everything falls apart when our lives get disrupted. And this becomes a huge problem — we get discouraged!
The Destructive Habit of Evaluating Everything We Do
We are in the mental habit of constantly evaluating everything we do, to see if we’re worthy or not. This mental habit of evaluating everything — while completely normal and natural — is actually pretty destructive. Why?
How to Get Back on Track with Motivation & Habits
It happens to all of us: you are going strong with a project, with learning something new, with a new habit or two … and things go sideways. You get derailed. This is a critical junction. If you let yourself quit, all your time and effort up until now has been for naught. If you can get back on track, things can be great again.
The Eternal Dilemma: Revenge or Forgiveness?
I’m obviously going to argue against revenge, so I should just say that now rather than acting like it’s going to surprise you. Instead, let me present my arguments against revenge, then offer up a different approach.
The Secret to Interpersonal Happiness
Let’s take a brief look at the ill-intentioned way of seeing things, then go into what I believe will transform most people’s interpersonal happiness — the good-hearted view.
The 4 Keys to Learning Anything
OK, so we all want to learn skills — new languages, programming skills, physical skills, history, math, writing, games, so much more. But these four problems stand in our way. Let’s take them on. We’re going to discover four keys to overcoming these four problems so that we can tackle anything we want to learn.
The Mindfulness of Pure Experience
Usually, we’re caught up in a narrative about ourselves, our lives, our current situation, other people. We might notice the pure experience, but almost immediately we start judging it, wishing it were different, getting upset at it, or wishing it didn’t have to change.
5 Ways to Simplify Today
Instead of trying to simplify your whole life, tossing out all your clutter and paring your schedule to just meditation and writing your novel … how about just simplifying one thing?