Improve Your Productivity

Every self-help program talks about the importance of taking a 10-15 minute break to boost your productivity. Breaks give us much needed time to rest our eyes, move around, stretch our stiff muscles, get more blood and oxygen flowing to our brain, to unwind and obtain a fresh outlook on complex work problems.

There is just one problem – we often forget to take them.  Going to the bathroom, grabbing a cup of coffee or checking Facebook updates does not count, as these activities hardly give us enough time to energize our body and restore our concentration and productivity.

As strange as it may sound, taking regular breaks throughout the work day requires discipline and a little bit of planning. Actually, the reason why so many people push themselves to the limit of exhaustion is simple – they just can not think of any interesting activities they can do, during their break time. So they end up working for 4-5 hours straight until their body offers them a painful reminder.

If this sounds like you, here are some Counter-Intuitive Break ideas that help to restore your energy, sharpen your focus, boost productivity and avoid burnout at work.

Share your break with a co-worker. Alone, you might not always have the strength to pull yourself away from the computer, but if you have a friend taking breaks with you, it is much easier to stick with your break routine. In addition, it offers a great opportunity to bond with your colleagues and get to know them better.

Step outside for a fresh perspective. Leaving a stuffy office and letting yourself enjoy the warmth of the sunlight, the coolness of a breeze and the freshness of the spring air can do miracles to your mind and body. You will come back feeling rejuvenated and ready to approach your work with new energy and a fresh perspective.

Close your eyes and take 10 deep breaths. Stand up and walk away from your desk. Find a quiet place, where you can sit down, close your eyes, smile to yourself and take a few deep breaths. Imagine tension, stress and anxiety leaving your body as you breathe out, and peacefulness, positivity and relaxation filling your mind with every breath that you take.

Re-waterize yourself. First drink a full glass of water. Second splash some water on your face: warm to relax, cold – to wake up and energize yourself.

Rock out to some great music. Music is a great mood changer, especially if you allow yourself to get up and move with it. Just a few minutes of humming and dancing can put a smile on your face and get your blood moving.

Modify Your Wordpress Theme

Want to know the secret of having a custom WordPress Theme just like the coding and design experts, Without having to create your own custom WordPress Theme?

Are you a WordPress site developer wanting to significantly cut your development time by using your own WordPress Theme Framework? Or do you just plain wish editing WordPress Themes was smarter and easier? Then read on.

WordPress Child Theme

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WordPress Action Hooks

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WordPress Filter Hooks

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Overcoming Your Failure

Failure is the most important step to reaching success, but it can still feel like it’s crushing your soul. To make failure your friend and not your enemy, you must overcome it. Here are some strategies for moving on after a tough break.

Normally, though, we reserve the word failure for the bigger things. The times when we’ve let others down, and, more importantly, ourselves. Trying your hardest to do something important and failing is when it really stings and shakes your confidence. Maybe your startup business idea failed, you lost the big game, or you let someone you care about down. Sometimes failure can leave a mark—but it doesn’t have to.

Feel What You Need to Feel

Failure can take a hefty emotional toll, and that’s okay. What’s important is getting the negative feelings you have out of your system so you can regroup and tackle what’s next. Don’t keep how you feel trapped inside of you like a shaken up soda. Bottling your emotions can lead to two things:

• An emotional outburst: Eventually the pressure will build and it will be too much for you to contain. In a moment of weakness, everything you’ve kept inside could explode and set you back even further. This not only affects your mental state, but it can affect your relationships too. When you have an outburst, the people you care about often end up in the crossfire.


• Creeping negativity: If you only loosen the cap, the negativity will slowly and persistently enter your mind. You need to openly confront the mistakes you made and give yourself the chance to feel it all. Otherwise, anxiety will start to linger in the back of your mind and the soft hiss of failure will continue. Constant anxiety is incredibly unhealthy and can lead to even more problems.

So, how do you let it all out? There are a few ways to get the bad, and—most importantly—retain the knowledge you gained:

• Set aside some time: It’s okay to feel like you’ve hit rock bottom. Completely ignoring what happened isn’t helpful, so set aside a specific amount of time to wallow as much as you want. Take some time to be angry, upset, and frustrated so you can get it all out. If it’s something small, all you may need is an hour to pace around or cry in a pillow. For something larger, give yourself a full 24 hours to let it all out and wake up the next day with a clean slate. If you need more than a day, that’s okay, but make sure it’s an amount of time set by you and that you stick to it. You get that time to be as mopey as you want, but when it’s over, move on.


• Talk about it: Talk to somebody you know about how you’re feeling. It’s well known that just talking about something can make you feel better. Take a load off and express yourself. Chances are whoever you talk to will try to make you feel better, but even if they don’t, saying how you feel out loud puts that information out somewhere besides your brain.


• Don’t let it become a part of your identity: Failure is something that happens, not something you are. Susan Tardanico at Forbes explains that just because you haven’t found a successful way to do something doesn’t mean you are a failure. Be careful not to blur the lines between making mistakes and being someone who only makes mistakes. Our actions may define us, but our failures do not. The actions you take to move past failure and reach success will define you in the end.

Failure can leave an open wound and it’s unwise to ignore it. Without acknowledging it, your wound will continue to hurt, take longer to heal, and possibly get infected.

Change Your Definition of Failure

Have we mentioned that failure is good? It can be hard to think that way, but changing your definition of failure can help you cope. Failure is a learning and growing opportunity that is necessary for growth.

Robert Spadinger at Pick the Brain has a list of truths that can help adjust your own definition of failure:

1. Failure is an integral part on the way to success and self realization.


2. Whenever you step outside the comfort zone and whenever you try something new, failure becomes inevitable.


3. Each failure brings you one step closer to reaching your goals.


4. Failure is a great teacher and it allows you to learn some of the most valuable life lessons.


5. Each failure makes you stronger, bigger and better.


6. Making mistakes is not a big deal as long as you learn from them and avoid repeating them.


7. Failure teaches you that a certain approach may not be ideal for a specific situation and that there are better approaches.


8. Successful people will never laugh at you or judge you when you fail, because they have already been there and they know about the valuable lessons you can learn from failure.


9. No matter how often you fail, you are not a failure as long as you don’t give up.


10. Each time you fail, your fear of failure becomes smaller, which allows you to take on even bigger challenges.

Every mistake is a learning opportunity, and after you’ve moved past your emotions, it’s important to revisit your mistakes with a new perspective. Look at what you did that went wrong, but also look at what you did that was right, and what you can do better next time. Failure is rarely so black and white.

Image Alignment Example

Welcome to image alignment! The best way to demonstrate the ebb and flow of the various image positioning options is to nestle them snuggly among an ocean of words. Grab a paddle and let’s get started.

On the topic of alignment, it should be noted that users can choose from the options of None, Left, Right, and Center. In addition, they also get the options of Thumbnail, Medium, Large & Fullsize.



The image above happens to be centered.

The rest of this paragraph is filler for the sake of seeing the text wrap around the 150×150 image, which is left aligned.

As you can see the should be some space above, below, and to the right of the image. The text should not be creeping on the image. Creeping is just not right. Images need breathing room too. Let them speak like you words. Let them do their jobs without any hassle from the text. In about one more sentence here, we’ll see that the text moves from the right of the image down below the image in seamless transition. Again, letting the do it’s thang. Mission accomplished!

And now for a massively large image. It also has no alignment.



The image above, though 1200px wide, should not overflow the content area. It should remain contained with no visible disruption to the flow of content.

And now we’re going to shift things to the right align. Again, there should be plenty of room above, below, and to the left of the image. Just look at him there… Hey guy! Way to rock that right side. I don’t care what the left aligned image says, you look great. Don’t let anyone else tell you differently.

In just a bit here, you should see the text start to wrap below the right aligned image and settle in nicely. There should still be plenty of room and everything should be sitting pretty. Yeah… Just like that. It never felt so good to be right.

And just when you thought we were done, we’re going to do them all over again with captions!



The image above happens to be centered. The caption also has a link in it, just to see if it does anything funky.

Little bit caption

The rest of this paragraph is filler for the sake of seeing the text wrap around the 150×150 image, which is left aligned.

As you can see the should be some space above, below, and to the right of the image. The text should not be creeping on the image. Creeping is just not right. Images need breathing room too. Let them speak like you words. Let them do their jobs without any hassle from the text. In about one more sentence here, we’ll see that the text moves from the right of the image down below the image in seamless transition. Again, letting the do it’s thang. Mission accomplished!

And now for a massively large image. It also has no alignment.

Massive image caption for your eyeballs.

The image above, though 1200px wide, should not overflow the content area. It should remain contained with no visible disruption to the flow of content.

Feels good to be right all the time.

And now we’re going to shift things to the right align. Again, there should be plenty of room above, below, and to the left of the image. Just look at him there… Hey guy! Way to rock that right side. I don’t care what the left aligned image says, you look great. Don’t let anyone else tell you differently.

In just a bit here, you should see the text start to wrap below the right aligned image and settle in nicely. There should still be plenty of room and everything should be sitting pretty. Yeah… Just like that. It never felt so good to be right.

And that’s a wrap, yo! You survived the tumultuous waters of alignment. Image alignment achievement unlocked!