A busy workday may not exactly be the ideal environment for practising mindfulness. Yet, according to experts, it is possible to achieve it. As a matter of fact, mindfulness holds the key to workplace effectiveness. Remember that no matter how many emails, meetings and phone calls you have to address, you can still practice a good deal of mindfulness.
The following tips can help you much in that regard:
Make a conscious attempt to be present – by definition, mindfulness is all about keeping yourself aware and awake, instead of going on autopilot. Being consciously present at work enables you to see what is going on within you and around you. You can better identify what you need to do and how to do it most effectively. Acknowledge any thoughts that are intruding on your workday, and calmly bring yourself back to what needs doing.
- Clear out the area – being more mindful at work is difficult if you are surrounded by clutter and environment lacking in cleanliness. How clean your workplace is can affect your wellbeing in many ways. Therefore, office and window cleaning is thing you should take care of. Hire a company to address the job and find effective methods for dealing with clutter to become more mindful and focused on the job.
- Deal with one task at a time – while it may sound like a useful skill, multitasking is actually an illusion. Nobody can deal effectively with more than a single task at a time. If you try to do so, your brain will switch from one task to the next, losing data in the process. You only feel that you are doing more, while in reality, you are actually being unproductive when dealing with more than one task at a time.
Slowing down to speed things up – initially, you may think that slowing down is actually going to harm your work. The truth of the matter is that if you are always in a rush, your energy will drop to zero eventually. Rest is good for productivity. If you manage your sleep time well and manage to do a few quick mindfulness exercises at work, you can get some much-needed rest. The best entrepreneurs slow down as they know just how important it is to be able to speed things up later on.
- Befriend stress – believe it or not, your perception of stress matters greatly. It affects how your body and mind react to it. Therefore, if you are highly stressed and think that it negatively affects you, it more than certainly will do just that. You have to change how you think about stress and how you respond to it. A change like that can make you more productive at work and also help you cope with challenges in a creative, rather than a negative way.
Now that you know how to become more mindful at work, you should embrace this opportunity. It will improve your work life quite a bit.