Month: June 2016
Six Things Productive People Do Every Morning
You’re reading Six Things Productive People Do Every Morning, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Is waking up in the morning basically torture to you? Do you find yourself drifting off and longing for your soft bed, the outsides, or those delicious pizza leftovers during a meeting?
Don’t beat yourself up, this is actually a pretty common occurrence nowadays. Fortunately, there are a few simple and very effective morning routine habits that will improve your creativity, productivity, and overall mood.
Eat a generous and healthy breakfast
No doubt about it, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It provides physical and mental energy to power you through the day. You will be able to better focus on your tasks and to be more efficient overall.
Although there are no restrictions when it comes to what you should eat in the morning no matter your shape or size, since you will use most of those calories during the day, if you want to get the best out of this meal you should look for high nutrients, vitamins, and minerals contents.
Exercise
I’m sure you already know exercising has many benefits for our general health and wellbeing, but did you know the best time to exercise is in the morning? A few minutes of intense physical activity will not only properly wake you up, but also oxygenate your brain. You will be able to focus properly, come up with solutions quicker and generally feel better about yourself.
If you’re like me and you feel like exercising is pointless since it involves no challenges, you can bike your way to work or ask someone to exercise with you, since this might bring out your competitive side.
Resolve your personal issues before work
Having distractions at work is practically unavoidable, whether we’re talking about a conversation taking place in your office or a pigeon flying into your window. Getting back to a task you were distracted from takes precious time and letting a few good ideas slip is unavoidable.
This is why it’s important to minimize your distractions ever since the beginning of the day. Calling your loved ones, contacting your ISP regarding your internet speed are things that should take no more than 10 minutes, so why do something later when you can do it now?
Meditate
Just like physical activity will get you in shape, meditation will sharpen your mind and give you a positive attitude towards goals, issues and people. This will lead to an advanced state of well-being and better professional and personal achievements. This will come in handy not just when you’re getting ready for work, but also when you’re preparing for a job interview. Regardless of the type of job you’re aiming for, those stressful nerves will inevitably set in before the big day. Take 15 minutes in the morning to reconnect with yourself and things should go much smoother after that.
Set your goals for the day
Regardless of what you have planned for the day, being organized is a key factor in productivity. Making a written or mental list of your activities and goals for the day will let you know how much time you have to invest in each one without leaving anything out. This can also help you prioritize them and decide how to work smart instead of hard.
Mornings are the best time do to that since you can revise your schedule with fresh eyes and maybe even improve it in ways you wouldn’t have thought about later in the day because of the pressure.
Stay away from TVs, PCs or laptops as much as possible
If you will be stuck to a chair in front of a monitor for 8 hours a day, it’s important to give your eyes and brain a little time off. You can watch the sunrise as you eat your breakfast or replace the music with the chirping of birds outside.
Even though it might be hard at first to make time for these activities, once you get used to doing them you will clearly see the improvement. Apart from concentration and productivity, these will result in a better attitude towards your life and your career.
If this is not the case, however, it might mean the career you chose is not for you and you should look into other paths you can follow. This might seem scary at first, but sooner or later you will need to get out of your comfort zone and take these positive steps towards a productive life.
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Amanda Wilks is a Digital Marketing Specialist and a part-time writer, dedicated to helping people find meaningful careers. She has a great interest in everything related to job-seeking, career-building, and entrepreneurship.
Image source: Deposit Photos
You’ve read Six Things Productive People Do Every Morning, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
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Kaleidoscope / Cong Sinh Architects
© Quang Tran
- Architects: Cong Sinh Architects
- Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh 70000, Vietnam
- Architect In Charge: Vo Quang Thi
- Design Team: Vo Quang Thi, Nguyen Thi Nha Van, Phung Kim Phuoc
- Project Year: 2015
- Photographs: Quang Tran
- Model Photographs : Hiroyuki Oki
- Project Manager: Vo Quang Thi
- Contractor: Thanh An Interiors And Construction
© Quang Tran
The rapid urbanization in several Asian cities has dramatically reduced the living area per person. Especially in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, most people, sometimes extended families, spend their lives in narrow and long tube houses where they live apart from nature and in dark and unventilated spaces.
Long tube houses for extended families have always been a complicated question for generations of Vietnamese architects.
© Quang Tran
The building which is 3.8 meters wide and 40 meters long belongs to a 3-generation family with different ages, lifestyles and interests. The requirement is that there is personal space for each member. However, there needs to be some open common areas, just like in traditional Vietnamese houses. They will create a link between generations.
© Quang Tran
The front yard, backyard and terrace of the house are great places with fresh air for adults to relax and restore their energy for work. After school, the young members can play at the swimming pool at the center of the house. The elderly members usually have free time, so looking after the plants and having regular contact with other members at the common areas can make them happy.
The ventilation and lighting solutions put forward are suitable for the tropical climate in Vietnam. The aim is to save energy more efficiently, help reduce climate change, bring family members closer to nature and help them become more responsible for the environment.
Section
The water and plants make the air fresher and cooler in every corner of the house. The wind can go into the building from both facades. Then, it is filtered by the double skin made of layers of plants. And finally, the fresh air goes through the living spaces and exits via the skylight.
The sunlight that goes into the house from the two facades is filtered by the plants. The amount of sunlight that actually penetrates the house is appropriate. The sunlight from the skylight is filtered by a concrete louver placed in a position that matches the sun’s path. At the hottest time of the day, this louver will reduce the amount of the sunlight going down the stairs below. Moreover, the sunlight can still get inside through many slots on some walls.
© Quang Tran
The dappled sunlight appears everywhere in the building. At each time in a day, the sunlight comes in and creates different shapes at many places along the house. This brings everyone feelings of happiness and excitement.
The architects hope that they have created a fresh, healthy and meaningful living space that can bring family members closer to each other, and at the same time, closer to nature in their daily life.
© Quang Tran
Librairie Avant-Garde – Ruralation Library / AZL Architects
Courtesy of AZL Architects
- Architects: AZL Architects
- Location: Zhejiang, China
- Architect In Charge: Zhang Lei / AZL Architects
- Design Team: Zhang Lei，Liu Wei, Ma Haiyi，Chen Junjun, Zhang Qilin, Shao Xuan
- Area: 260.0 sqm
- Project Year: 2015
- Photographs: Courtesy of AZL Architects
- Collaborator: ADI-NJU
Courtesy of AZL Architects
From the architect. Located in Daijiashan Village,Eshan She Nationality Township of Tonglu, Zhejiang Province, the Avant-Garde Ruralation Library is the 11th Bookstore run by the Librairie Avant-Garde. With the culture-spreading idea ——Avant-Garde and Library, as well as the unique regional natural and human landscape of the ‘Shes’ village, this project has become the public life bond among local villagers and alien readers, and also become a a focal point of local cultural and creative industries. The main body of the library was an idle yard lying at one side of the village’s main street, including two yellow mud adobe houses and a platform projecting from a slope. While maintaining the structural and spatial sequence of the buildings and courtyards, the architectural design restores the current declined status to a healthy state. The relationship between the new and the old strengthens the ‘timing’. The carriers of time and memory – the adobe walls, tile roofs and roof trusses have become the spatial dominance, and have jointly created context-continuing contemporary local aesthetics, together with the publicity of function regeneration.
Courtesy of AZL Architects
The Chinese thousands-of-year tradition roots in agricultural civilization. The authentic Chinese architectural tradition lies in the rural settlement, the organic and integral urban-rural relations, as well as the continuing development model lasting for thousands of years, which is a sort of territoriality based on ‘cultural consciousness’.Our thinking focuses on the fundamental aspect ‘time’. The touching built environment characteristics in any area are the strength of time depositing. Comparing with the irresistible ‘time’, the ‘space’ design meticulously constructed by architects tends to be more personalized, and cannot face the challenge of life.
Courtesy of AZL Architects
In the Avant-Garde Ruralation Library renewal project, the creation of architectural space i.s strictly constrained, and carefully made as an imperceptible time ‘rest’. The new elements including courtyard corridors and interior facilities are attenuated by their pure form.Equally important, these subtle formal elements – which also are the industrialized and productized addition, is crucial relating to the contemporary function of libraries. The re-established spatial boundaries of the ‘old’ building created by the ‘new’ elements re-direct the past time to reality. From the construction process to the cultural management integrating into the rural life, the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ together contribute to a stage of life scenarios, rather than an abstract purified spatial definition.
Ground Floor Plan
Section
To adapt to the new function of the library, the most critical design strategy is to lift up the roof. The internal beam-column frame which supports the roof has been heightened by 60cm as a whole. Taking the advantage of the increased height, the high windows can be constructed; thus light, air and the beautiful bamboo forest landscape are naturally introduced into the interior reading space. The realization of the roof uplifting mainly relies on the local craftsmen’s traditional skills – extending partial columns by the means of crafty tenon skill. Parallely the renovation of the grey-tile roof is undertaken; the thermal insulation construction attached to the sheathing has greatly improved the thermal performance of the old building. Outside the building, due to the high windows the original adobe walls and grey-tile roof take on a dramatic performance — closed and open, heavy and light, forming a gentle landscape focus of the village against the background of the trimmed outdoor landscape and lighting design.
Courtesy of AZL Architects
The permeable wooden grille corridor linking the main room and the partial room is able to strengthen the functional connection between the renewed library and the café, and also to redefine the sensitive experiencing sequence of the outdoor space. In between the streets, the stairs and the corridor, a compact and friendly front yard is situated;passing through the tortuous corridor, or coming out from the inside of the building, the building, the corridor and the arc-profiled platform come into sight, which together define the outdoor reading space. Inside the building, the well-organized stairwell, partial platform, and permeable bookshelf partition contribute to spatial publicity; the renovated wooden roof structure forms a bright and powerful space atmosphere by means of intensifying the lighting.
Exploded Axonometric
Courtesy of AZL Architects
The most common brick masonry structure is applied to the café foyer added within the partial room on the east side, the stairs and the toilets constructed in the main room on the west side. Its independent foundation treatment has a reinforcing effect on the main structure of the original building. With the highly-attenuated form of industrial products, the newly-built interior walls, floors, stairs, furnishings and other facilities define the time boundaries of the traditional building, and form the regulating mechanism of the contemporary new function; thereby the space is enabled to accommodate continuing and developing contemporary regional life experience.
Courtesy of AZL Architects
Italyphoto via robert
Sig Nordal 