You may already be familiar with the concept of meditation. Many people connect meditation with eastern philosophies such as Buddhism. They may also assume meditation is focused on the process of clearing your mind of all thoughts.

While meditation has become increasingly popular amongst the Western world, so too is our understanding of the benefits and the process of meditating. Meditation is focused less on clearing the mind but instead drawing attention to the present whether that attempting to focus your mind or not.

Guided meditation involves someone leading you through a meditation session. Guided meditation usually involves someone speaking throughout the meditation session. The speaker gives suggestions about how you can direct your thinking while you go through the meditation experience.

A lot of research has been undertaken on the biological and psychological benefits of meditation. These benefits are available across the lifespan amongst a wide variety of demographics.

Meditation has a number of reported benefits including:

• Reduce stress and anxiety
• Reduce insomnia
• Reduce high blood pressure
• Decrease pain symptoms
• Overcome substance abuse
• Improve creativity
• Improve memory
• Improve workplace productivity
• Increases positive emotion
• Assists with problem solving
• Focus on compassion and not revenge
• Assists with emotional regulation
• Improves self control
• Assist with ADHD and ADD

There are various forms of meditation. Some of the more popular types of meditation are:

• Transcendental meditation (TM) – involves repeating a mantra
• Mindfulness Meditation – involves a focus on the present
• Guided Meditation – involves a speaker providing suggestions for how to direct the meditation experience
• Mantra Meditation – involves using a syllable, word, or phrase repeated throughout the meditation
• Spiritual Meditation – focuses on moving beyond your personal experiences and focusing on the presence of joy, peace, and love
• Meditation connected with physical practice – eg. Yoga, tai chi etc

Most meditation practices have a similar goal but may use a slightly different path to achieve the same goal. For beginners, one of the most popular types of meditation is guided meditation.

Meditation may feel difficult for people who are caught up in the busyness and stresses of life. To sit still, quietly, and attempt to focus your thoughts can be a difficult experience. Having someone to guide your thoughts through a meditation session can help you reduce the feelings of overwhelm and distraction.

Guided meditations can be a great introduction to meditation. As you develop through your meditation practice, you may choose to move away from guided meditations, and instead focus on your own methods of meditation.

Guided meditation is provided by a trained practitioner who guides you through a meditation practice using text, audio, video or a combination of various formats.

The meditation practitioner guides you through a process of mental thoughts and imagery to activate the senses of sight, sound, taste, smell and touch. Guided meditations are not informational lectures. Guided meditations are a personal connection to your experiences, feelings and emotions as you are guided through the session.

Guided meditation is an excellent method to use as a beginner to meditation. Meditation can often feel like a frustrating endeavour to beginners who feel they are constantly fighting with distracting thoughts.

Using guided meditation helps a beginner through the process of meditation by providing a series of focused instructions on how to redirect thoughts when distractions arise. Guided meditations also help to provide a central focus while you explore your thoughts and feelings through mental imagery.

Guided meditations as especially effective in helping to create a state of relaxation through developing awareness of physical sensations.

Most meditation sessions are focused on 3 primary goals:

1. INTENTION: setting your intention for your meditation practice including the time and space needed for your meditation session.
2. PHYSICAL: paying attention to any physical sensations you are feeling
3. EMOTIONS: paying attention to the emotions that may arise during your meditation sessions.

You can start your meditation practice with a 5 minute session. This amount of time will help you develop the practice of devoting time to becoming present and finding time to dedicate to relaxation.

As you become more practiced with your meditation sessions, you can increase the time you spent on your meditation practice.

Meditation is like any other skill that you are trying to acquire – the more you practice, the easier it gets.

Below are 10 guided meditations to get you started on your journey to relaxation through meditation.

1. ABC Radio National
2. Audio Dharma
3. Sharon Salzberg
4. Fragrant Heart 
5. Sam Harris
6. Meditation Oasis
7. Mindfulness Meditation
8. Tara Brach 
9. The Guided Meditation Site
10. UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center

These meditations can be played on your computer, phone or tablet.

Running your own Reiki practice requires a careful balance of client work and business tasks. Spending time with clients is the most important task, however, administrative tasks need attention also. It’s important to find the balance between client work and administrative work with time management systems in place.

We’re going to look at two specific apps called RescueTime and StayFocusd that will help you analyze and manage your time more effectively.

Visit RescueTime

RescueTime is installed on your computer and tracks the programs and websites where you spend your time. In addition to tracking your time, RescueTime provides excellent analytics to provide insight into your most and least productive hours and days over a specific period of time.

The insight that RescueTime gives you an accurate picture of how you actually do spend your time instead of relying on your perception of how you spend your time.

Here are some of the most useful features of RescueTime:

• Runs securely in the background on your computer and mobile devices
• Tracks time spent on applications and websites, giving you an accurate picture of your day
• Gives you detailed reports and data based on your activity

There are 2 options available:

• RescueTime Lite Free
• RescueTime Premium $9 USD per month or $72.00 USD per year

Below is a comparison from the RescueTime website on the difference between the 2 plans.

Visit StayFocusd Chrome Store Link

From the creators:

StayFocusd is a productivity extension for Google Chrome that helps you stay focused on work by restricting the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites. Once your allotted time has been used up, the sites you have blocked will be inaccessible for the rest of the day. It’s highly configurable, allowing you to block or allow entire sites, specific subdomains, specific paths, specific pages, even specific in-page content (videos, games, images, forms, etc).

Once you have gained insights into how you spend your time on your computer using RescueTime, StayFocusd helps you manage access to programs and apps to help you minimize distractions and spend more time being productive.

StayFocusd can be used by individually limiting time, days and specific websites. For example, you may want to limit your time spent on Facebook and restrict its use during the daytime. You can also use it to limit your overall daily time spent on a website. If you want to access Facebook at any time of the day, you can set an overall daily limit of 30 mins.

You can also utilize the “nuclear” option which blocks the ability to access specific websites, links or the entire internet. All of these options can be adjusted depending on your needs.

Below is an example of how you might want to use the StayFocusd app:

1. Limit your daily usage of Facebook to 60 mins per day. You may decide to split this time by checking 30 mins in the morning and 30 mins at night. Knowing you have this limited time you will become more focused on important tasks like updating your Facebook business page and responding to any comments. Out of each 30 min block, you might want to allocate 5 mins to reviewing the news feed of your personal contacts.

2. If you want to write a blog post, you can limit your access to the internet for 30 mins so you are able to research your topic. You can then apply the ‘go nuclear’ option for the next hour so you can focus on writing your content. If you need to do any additional online research, include a notation in your written content that highlights a need for later revision. You can use a bold notation such as <TO REVIEW> when writing. At a later date, you can quickly identify the areas that need additional research by looking for the <TO REVIEW> notations.

3. You may want to block personal websites from your desktop computer and only access them through a mobile device that you use outside of work hours. This will ensure your computer is used as a workspace only.

Below are some screen shots highlighting the features of StayFocusd.

There is a multitude of tools available to help you improve your productivity, however, it’s important to use this tools sparingly. You may find yourself spending too much time installing, learning and managing too many tools and then realize your broad goal of limiting distractions is lost. The use of these tools should be based on your individual needs with a strong focus on helping you achieve results.

If you are generally a productive person but some tasks are more difficult for you to concentrate on, then using productivity tools for that specific task can be helpful.

You can choose to use RescueTime less frequently to provide you with a snapshot of where you are spending your time. As we are creatures of habit you will find your time is spent on the same tasks fairly consistently so you can rely on doing an initial analysis of your time with RescueTime, and then make any changes to your workflow based on the reports. If you find your time starts to become unproductive, you can then use RescueTime for another 1-2 week period to gain some additional insight into how your activities might have changed.

The best use of StayFocusd is to enter any websites that you want to block, limit, or allow. For limiting access, you can set parameters for time limits and days of the week to apply the StayFocusd rules that you set in place.

RescueTime is useful in assessing how time might be wasted. It can also help estimate how long tasks take to complete so that we can plan our time accurately. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman proposes that we have an optimism bias which leads us to underestimate how much time it takes to complete a task. This underestimation is called the planning fallacy. Tools like RescueTime can help combat this bias by providing us with actual data.

In addition to using RescueTime and StayFocusd, we’ve created a spreadsheet that you can use to track your time. You can either enter the data into excel directly as your day progresses, or you could print the worksheet out as a blank template and hand write your tasks and time spent on each task.

Time tracking only needs to be undertaken a few times a year to provide you with an accurate assessment of how you actually spend your time. Once you have the data, you can then adjust your activities to increase your productivity. You can then conduct a similar time tracking session later in the year to see if your changes have worked.

Podcasts have become increasingly popular in recent years with some podcasts achieving more listeners per episode than some mainstream TV programs. There is a podcast topic for almost every imaginable topic including topics that appeal to interests in business and personal life.

One topic that covers the range of both business and personal domains is the topic of productivity with a focus on getting things done (GTD). In this post, we include a list of productivity podcasts to help you increase your productivity in your Reiki business and personal life.

Some of the benefits of podcasts are:

• Podcasts are a great way to fill time. Podcasts are popular for people who commute to work or long distance trips. Alternatively, they are good to listen to when exercising, gardening or doing household tasks that don’t require any significant load on our attention.
• Podcasts allow you to create your own mentors for your business and personal life by picking and choosing podcasts topics that benefit your personal growth
• Podcasts are educational. Many educators, colleges, and universities provide free audio lectures through podcasting
• Podcasts help you focus on specific areas that you want to learn about or make improvements in your life
• Podcasts are portable and can be listened to anywhere. You can access them via the internet or download them to listen to later when you are offline.
• Podcasts are free. Some providers offer additional content for an additional cost, however, the concept of podcasts relies on providing free content to attract an audience.

Podcasts are primarily delivered as audio only, however, some podcasters also record their podcasts on video and upload to YouTube as a secondary source of publishing their content. You can listen to podcasts through a podcasting app on your smartphone or tablet. Most podcasters also have their own website where they provide links to their podcast episodes which means you can also listen to episodes on your desktop computer.

Most people listen to podcasts while in transit or doing other activities such as housework, gardening, or exercise, so portable devices are the most popular method of listening to podcasts.

Below is a list (alphabetical order) of some of the most popular podcast apps and delivery services. Most apps are free, however some offer optional upgrades for a fee to unlock additional features:

• Google Play Music
• Grover Podcast
• iTunes 
• Overcast (the one I use)
• Player FM
• Podcast Addict
• Podcast Republic 
• Short Orange
• Soundcloud
• Spotify 
• Stitcher 

Below is a list of 10 Productivity podcasts, along with a recommended episode from each podcast to get you started.

1. Asian Efficiency Suggested episode: 5 Ways to Apply the 80/20 Ruse to Free Up 2+ Hours a Week
2. Beyond the To Do List Suggested episode: Being vs Doing Chase Reeves on Journaling, Mediation and Mindfulness
3. Extreme Productivity Suggested Episode: Stay Focused While Working from Home
4. Get It Done Guy Suggested Episode: How to Use the 80/20 Principle to Perfect Your Writing
5. Getting Things Done Suggested episode: Defining Your Areas of Focus
6. Positive Productivity Suggested Episode: Shiny Object Syndrome
7. The 5 am Miracle Podcast Suggested Episode: How to Design Your Day with Claire Diaz-Ortiz
8. The Accidental Creative Suggested Episode: How To Stay Creatively Inspired With a Study Plan
9. The Productive Woman Suggested Episode: Productivity Challenges of Introverts and Extroverts 
10. The Productivityist Podcast Suggested episode: Demystifying Evernote with Charles Byrd

SIGN UP below to receive your FREE DOWNLOAD – Resource Sheet of Useful Planning Books and Blogs.