Meditation without the mindful bit
You can be productive while meditating
I didn’t want to get out of bed. Not because it was Monday (it wasn’t Monday), but because I’d formed a habit of sleeping until the latest possible moment every weekday morning, then rushing to get ready and head to the office to arrive just in time. I’d worked this schedule to perfection. It had no leeway for if my alarm failed to ruse me or the bus was late, but that was a risk I was willing to take for more snoozing.
Habits are our default behaviours, and bad habits can be tough to break without external stimuli. We like to tell ourselves we have the intrinsic motivation to break a bad habit, and when we do that’s great – in practice it’s rare.
One of life’s greatest ironies is whilst ‘bad’ habits are easy to form and hard to break, ‘good’ habits are the opposite.
It’s hard to argue for evolution when shit like this beleaguers us, seems more like someone is playing a grand ol’ cosmic joke.
One good habit that is hard to form is the habit of productive meditation. In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport describes this as taking “a period of time in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally – walking, jogging, driving, showering – and focus your attention on a single, well-defined professional problem”.
Like any meditation, doing it well requires practice. Distraction is inevitable, the mind will wander relentlessly to begin with. When you notice your thoughts are off task, reset your attention on the problem you set out to think about. This gets easier after a dozen or so sessions, and the results start to show.
Back to the opening story. Outside my house was a rosebush, which I rarely noticed until a day I’d got up 30 minutes early. Admittedly by mistake, thinking I had an early meeting, but I remembered just as I was leaving, that the meeting was cancelled late the day before. So, I stopped and admired the roses for a few minutes. When I did get to the office, I felt calmer and more ready to start the day. In hindsight, no surprise there!
Based on this external stimulus, I started habitually getting out of bed 10 minutes earlier every day (getting up 30 minutes earlier every day took more willpower than it was worth). With the extra time, I’d smell the roses on the way out the door, and with the less frantic commute, I could productively meditate to prepare for the day mentally. This combination of a little nature and productive meditation improved my mood and productivity throughout the day.
Maintaining the practice takes discipline, and I fall from it more often than I care to admit. Yet, there is a definite increase in productivity and the ability to work deeply from practising consistently.
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Cover image: Image by luis_molinerov on Freepik
You are literally stopping to smell the roses! I love this. I know you said meditation without the mindful bit, but it seems to me that you are successfully doing both mindfulness and productive meditation. I think it's a form of mindfulness "meditation" to stop, notice the roses, and smell them. It's a practice in being in the present. Thank you for sharing.