Take time away from the busyness to increase your business.

Where does the time go? From the pressures of work, to the responsibilities and obligation of family and friends, It just feels like there is not enough time in a day. Add another layer of the constant bombardment of news updates and social media alerts. One has to wonder how she/he ever finds the time to eat or sleep. Heres the thing, just setting aside a small amount of time for meditation, will make a world of difference for you and increase your competence on the every day tasks that you do.

I don’t have time to meditate … but I do have 5 minutes.

When I first began my quest for a meditation/stress reduction practice. I imagine I was like most people. SUPER busy, I mean all of this technology has freed up so much time like it was supposed to, right? So here I am, over stressed, “no time” for anything. Hardly any time to spend with my children, my wife, and not enough time to complete my work, much less meditate.

Especially in the beginning. When all I thought about, was how unproductive this time in meditation has been and I could be out doing things! “What a waste of productive time this meditation business is!” I thought to myself practically the entire meditation. I’m willing to be lousy at something for a while if I think it’s worthwhile. I’m kinda of obsessive when it comes to research and all of the research that I have done said, “You’ll be more productive.” “You’ll be less stressed.” “You’ll enjoy your work more…blah, blah, blah.” “Ugh… Okay, I’ll keep going”, I begrudgingly said to myself.

I knew the research was strong. I didn’t want to become indifferent (which is a lot of what I thought meditation would do to me) and feared that I would take time away from something else. Something that I thought was productive or could be doing and also lose my motivation as a result of meditating… Fortunately, both all of my assumptions were wrong. I think the most common tip I can share with people is, “whatever you think about meditation and what it is going to be, you’re most certainly bound to find that it’s not what you thought.” And thank goodness for that! I also was reading Tony Robbins at the time and read a quote for him that said, “If you don’t have 10 minutes, you don’t have a life.” Ouch… Okay, I’m listening…begrudgingly again…

I stuck with the practice. I found that before long, I was able to get done in 6 hours what took me 8 in the past. Not only that, but I felt better. It’s hard to put a metric on feeling better, but it’s not hard to notice! It is amusing to me when people that have been saying they need to meditate, that they “get it”, that they are planning on it etc. Always come to me later surprised and say something like, “It really does work! This and that makes sense now. Wow!” To which I smile, grateful that another person is reaping the benefits of that practice. We all win when that happens. 🙂

Meditation Practice: Take 5. Five minutes in the morning, Five minutes mid day.

1. Set aside five minutes in the morning and mid day (If morning and mid day don’t work, find other moments of five minutes that work for you).   .
2. Get away privately and practice.

Meditation Homework: Begin to track your progress.

1. In a work or notebook, keep a tally of your practices.
2. For 30 days, track daily frequency and length of time.
3. Begin to take notice and journal the differences in your work and life.

Meditation Research

Here is a link about the results of a meditation experiment, that a computer scientist did on a group office workers. From practicing meditation, these office workers become less stress and more competent at work and life.