Six keys to being excellent from HBR.org

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification  and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much  of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to build rituals — specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

Speed up, steadily

Today, we were told by our supervisors to get our projects done as soon as possible. Also, came to realise that there's gonna be lots of due dates in Mid September so i really need some ways to boost my productivity. Came across this video on facebook and the first rule is exactly the one that i need to comply with - limit distractions. In other words, i should INDULGE fully when doing something( no matter work or play), focus on that thing and not think about other things at all, no replying text messages, no daydreaming etc. A good motivation for me is to finish up my work ASAP so that i can get my ass back Penang during the next tuition free week!

Its the last semester of my degree life and most of the time my mind keeps thinking about how to fully utilise my last semester so that i have fun and also be able to manage my studies well, therefore, allthough it might be hard for me but my latest target would be BYE BYE DISTRACTION so that I could balance up time between work and play.

p/s: two other simple targets i'm setting is #1 To get rid of my hunchback habit, and #2 Eat Clean. Hope i would see the changes in me in two weeks time when i get back to my blog.

Signing off-