Monday Productivity Pointers

- [Instructor] Hello, I'm Oliver Shankdon, and welcome to this Week's Monday productivity pointers. And I challenge you to give today suggestion to try. Now I like getting work done, so I'm all about finding tools apps, software, anything that will make me more productive. So when I first heard about mindfulness and meditation, it was very difficult for me to buy into it and to believe that this could actually help me. How can I possibly take time out of my busy day to sit quietly and be mindful? I don't have time for that. Wow, Was I wrong? I committed myself to practice mindfulness every day for one month. And at the end of that month, I was amazed at the results. I was more focused and attentive, I was more in control of my emotions, I was better at handling stress. It was the opposite of what I originally thought. When I started to take time out for mindfulness, I found that the remainder of my time was much more productive and I began to get more done. Today I want to introduce you to some meditation apps that can help you take advantage of the power of mindfulness. I'm currently on an Android device, and you'll see that I have some meditation apps up on the screen. The two at the top are examples of free meditation apps. Now there are a ton of different free meditation apps depending on whether you're on the web, an iOS device or an Android device. The two I have up here are available on both iOS and Android devices. In the top left, I have insight timer. I'll go ahead and click on this. You'll see that you can also get a premium version and you can have a free trial but there is a free version that has over 35,000 titles. So there's a ton here that you get for free. Now, I recommend that when you start, you start with some guided meditations that will walk you through and teach you how to do it. I started out with just some silence or music and try to meditate, which I thought was just be quiet. But as I use these apps and started to learn more about the practice, paying attention to my breath, thinking about different things and being able to dismiss my thoughts it became so much more powerful. So I do recommend the guided meditations. Now you can see here, they have a beginner kit, learning to meditate, coping with anxiety, managing stress, improving sleep, advanced mindfulness at work, so on and so forth. And I'm want to back out of here and I'll go next to smiling mind. Now this is another free one, and from here I can go down to the bottom and click on my programs. Once I'm here up at the top on the right, I'll click all programs, and you can see they have a wide variety of different options, from adults, to kids and youth, families, classroom at work, and more. If I click on adults, it brings me to the different courses. And you'll notice this theme here, a lot of intro to mindfulness, mindfulness foundations. So don't feel intimidated, you'll go in here and they will help you to get started and figure out how to do this. I think these apps are excellent for the beginner as well as even for experts. Now, if you decide to get more serious about mindfulness and you want to dig in deeper, there are a couple meditation apps that do cost money but I think they're worth it. The first is on the bottom left and it's called Calm. I'll click here, this one I think does a great job of providing a bunch of different meditation apps, sleep meditation, they have music that can help you concentrate and help you to relax and more. The second one, and my favorite one is Headspace. That's here on the bottom right, I'll click and open that. And Headspace, I think is phenomenal, i think their instruction is great and they really teach you how to get the most out of meditation as they walk you through it. You can see here, I can click on the Meditate button on the bottom, shows me some of the different possibilities, different courses you can take. Click on sleep, move and focus. And these are just some of the things that you can access on this website. Now I know there are probably a lot of people listening to this and thinking no way, I'm not going to sit there and meditate. For some reason, it seems that meditation and mindfulness are often misunderstood. People think of them as weak or religious or too time consuming, but none of these are true. Like I said, in the beginning of this video, I challenge you to try today suggestion. Find a meditation app that works for you and give it an honest try, try it out for a couple of weeks. My guess is that you'll start to realize the benefits and we'll never stop doing it. Now, obviously I didn't go over this concept in depth. That would take an entire course but I do encourage you to read or watch more about it. You can even search for meditation and mindfulness in the LinkedIn learning library and you'll come across some great resources. I hope you try it. Until next time, I'm Oliver Shankdon, and I hope you're having a spectacular day.