“Mindfulness,” is the 2021 buzzword of the year. After such a difficult time since the pandemic started, so many employees started to look differently at the way they interact with their work.
They want more balance, more meaning and more flexibility in their time in the office. Practicing mindfulness – even if just for a few minutes a day – can go a long way in helping create the boundaries and attitudes you need to work with more intention.
Problem is, as soon as you sit at your desk (or, let’s be real, for some of us it’s still the couch), that moment of mindfulness is immediately buried until 47 unread emails, 4 active Slack channel discussions, a fast-approaching deadline and a project that just happened to come up at the last second and needs to be done within the next hour and a half.
And at the end of the day, you’re left just as harried and overwhelmed as the day before.
Working in mindfulness is tough, and part of that is because you’re setting goals that aren’t sustainable. It’s a great idea to think you can set an alarm for noon every day to remind you to take a 5-minute meditation to reset from the morning. But be honest with yourself – are you more likely to hit snooze until you finish your task, only to immediately forget about your meditation?
Here are a few practices that are easier to work into your day.
Create a mindful commute: If you’re back to heading into the office, use your commuting time to take moment to reset. You can’t do a traditional “close your eyes and zone out” meditation while driving (please), but you can still meditate in a different way. Turn off the radio and focus in. Sit in silence, count your breaths, pay attention to every single thing happening on the road around you. Even in motion, you can create moments of inner stillness and hyper-focus, which will serve you throughout the day. It’s a great way to create a sense of calm heading into the office in the morning and reset from the workday on your way home.
Working from home? You can still get these benefits. Set up a “remote commute” – use whatever time you otherwise would have spent driving to work to do a seated meditation, or even take your coffee on a mindful walk around the block.
Block-off time for emails: Checking your email can be the biggest time-suck of your workday. You can be in a good flow with a project, only to be completely derailed by an incoming email that you feel you have to answer right now. In those few minutes, you’ve completely lost momentum.
Turn off your email notifications and instead establish a few set times to go through your emails. This allows you to really focus on what you’re sending and receiving instead of firing off replies on autopilot.
Make sure to let people know this is your policy – if they have the expectation that you’re only going to check your emails at 9am and 4pm, they know to contact you in another way if the matter is truly urgent. It’s just one way you can be more mindful about the way you interact with your coworkers – and protect your own time and space.
Take your lunch: Give yourself time to actually sit and eat – and nothing else. It may seem like eating at your desk is a quick and effective way to stay productive throughout the day, but the act of multitasking is actually using your attention in ways you don’t notice. Instead of paying attention to the food you’re putting in your body to fuel yourself for the workday, you’re completely disregarding it in favor of the work in front of you. (We’ve all had that feeling where we’ve looked down, only to realize we already finished our last bite without noticing at all.)
At the same time, trying to eat while you work slows down your productivity as well. Let’s say you have 30 minutes – you may be able to simultaneously eat lunch and wrap up a report in that time, but if you just focused on the report and nothing else, you may be able to finish it in 20 minutes – or even 15, leaving you time to actually sit and eat. It’s the same time commitment, just used more efficiently and mindfully.
For some, these changes are big, but they go a long way in creating a more mindful day. Because the one thing about creating a mindfulness habit: the more you practice, the easier it gets.