In April, there were 11 posts published here on Life Optimizer. Let’s see what the best posts and comments were.

Best Posts

The two most visited posts were:

• Brain Workout: 10 Free Mind Games to Exercise Your Brain
• Being Your Best: Stop Comparing and Start Running

You can read the other posts on the archives page.

Best Comments

The comments I found to be the most insightful were:

• Joe Jaegers on Living a Fulfilling Life: A Guide to Following Your Heart
• Ann M. on Get More Things Done with Ultradian Sprint
• Stanley Bronstein on The Danger of Being Obsessed and How to Overcome It

Thanks Joe, Ann, and Stanley!

One Year Before

Looking back one year, the most visited post in April 2007 was 37 Lessons to Help You Live a Life that Matters.

This article is part of May 2008 theme: Mind.

Our brain is amazing. All scientific and technological achievements of human civilization come from the brain.

To better appreciate the magic of the brain, here are top 10 interesting facts about the human brain:

1. Your brain is the most energy-consuming part of your body. The brain represents only 2% of the body weight, but it uses up to 20 percent of the body’s energy production. The energy is used for cell-health maintenance and to fuel electrical impulses that neurons employ to communicate with one another.

2. Your brain contains about 100 billion neurons which is about 16 times the number of people on Earth. Each of them links to as many as 10,000 other neurons. This huge number of connections opens the way to massive parallel processing within the brain.

Read the complete article »

This month’s theme is mind, and I’d like to start with the reasons why mind development is important. By understanding the reasons, we will be better motivated to learn and develop our mind. If we just learn what and how without learning why, I’m afraid we won’t be motivated enough.

Without further ado, here are 8 reasons why mind development is important:

1. Your mind determines what you do

Whatever you do comes from your mind. You think about something before you do it. Even things you do not consciously do come from your subconscious mind. By understanding and developing your mind, you will be able to direct your behavior the way you want it.

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If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.
Chinese Proverb

Anger could cause big problems. A problem that is small in the beginning could become bad if we handle it with anger. Not only will the situation itself get worse, our relationships with others could also deteriorate. In short, handling something with anger won’t make things better.

That’s why it’s essential to control anger. By controlling anger we will be able to handle problems with calm. We can then exercise our wisdom and judgment to the problem at hand to achieve the best possible solution. Being someone who sometimes gets angry, there are some tips I find useful on dealing with anger. Here they are - choose the ones that work for you:

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I’m thinking of setting monthly theme here on Life Optimizer. There are three reasons for this:

1. I want to give you deeper coverage of certain topic so that you can better focus on optimizing that aspect of your life.

2. Personally I also want to focus my life optimization effort on certain aspect of my life. I believe it will give me better results than just trying to optimize my life in general. One month is a long enough period to get results from focused effort.

3. I’d like to have higher-quality discussions here that will enrich everyone. Since there is theme continuity during the month, everyone will have the chance to dig deeper into the topic so that there can be more lively discussions.

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Are you satisfied with your current level of productivity? I’m not. I’m always looking for ways to increase my productivity. The challenge, of course, is to get the most results within a certain period of time.

Recently I learned a technique to do exactly that called “ultradian sprint”. I read it in an article entitled Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time in Harvard Business Review:

Distractions are costly: A temporary shift in attention from one task to another - stopping to answer an e-mail or take a phone call, for instance - increases the amount of time necessary to finish the primary task by as much as 25%, a phenomenon known as “switching time”. It’s far more efficient to fully focus for 90 to 120 minutes, take a true break, and then fully focus on the next activity. We refer to these work periods as “ultradian sprints.”

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