{"id":4021,"date":"2013-07-28T21:24:03","date_gmt":"2013-07-29T01:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alifeofproductivity.com\/?p=4021"},"modified":"2022-09-07T17:03:25","modified_gmt":"2022-09-07T17:03:25","slug":"top-10-things-learned-productivity-meditating-for-35-hours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chrisbailey.com\/top-10-things-learned-productivity-meditating-for-35-hours\/","title":{"rendered":"The top 10 things I learned meditating for 35 hours last week"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Estimated Reading Time:<\/strong> 10 minutes, 29 seconds. I’ve bolded the golden nuggets if you’re in a bit of a hurry.<\/div><\/div><\/p>\n

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I remember it vividly.<\/strong><\/p>\n

About four years ago I was at a tea shop reading a book on meditation, when a Buddhist monk walked in and sat across the room from me.<\/p>\n

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As I read, I occasionally looked up at him, and saw that he was mindfully sipping on a cup of tea. He would slowly bring the cup to his mouth, smell the tea, then drink it slowly, savoring its taste, and slowly rest his arm back down again. He drank it so slowly that it took him about an hour to finish the small cup.<\/p>\n

I remember thinking: what a complete waste of time.<\/p>\n

After all, he could have gotten so much more done in that hour than just drinking tea. What if he picked up a book? What if he listened to a podcast or a few TED talks<\/span><\/a> and learned something new? What if he invited one of his other monk friends to join him? He could have been so much more productive.<\/p>\n

Today, I think the exact opposite.<\/p>\n

Four years later – yesterday, in fact – I sat alone in my kitchen mindfully sipping a cup of tea. Like the monk, it took me about an hour, but I truly couldn’t imagine a better use of my time.<\/p>\n

Meditation and mindfulness look absolutely pointless on the surface, and that’s because on the surface, they are. <\/b>The real magic of meditation happens on the inside. Meditation and mindfulness completely reprogram your mind.<\/strong> Both practices increase the blood flow to your brain, calm you down, and allow you to better handle stress. They also make your brain younger by increasing your brain’s grey matter, and help your mind defragment its thoughts. They’ve even been shown to boost your test scores.1<\/a><\/sup> Not to mention that they make you feel freaking awesome.<\/p>\n

Over the past seven days I meditated for a whopping 35 hours<\/a><\/span>, and diving deep into the practice I observed its myriad benefits first hand. Here are the top 10 things I learned about productivity meditating for 35 hours last week.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\"image.003\"10. If you don’t want to meditate, try integrating mindfulness into your daily life.<\/b><\/h2>\n

Over the last seven days, I experimented with countless ways to integrate meditation and mindfulness into my daily life. I think a lot of people are put off by sitting meditation, because on the surface it seems foreign and complicated (even though it isn’t – I wrote a great guide to getting started here<\/span><\/a>). If you don’t want to practice sitting meditation, I think you can reap most of the benefits of meditation when you actively seek out ways to integrate mindfulness into your daily life. Last week I mindfully: shaved, showered, walked, snacked, drank tea, and a lot more. In a comment<\/span><\/a> on one of my posts last week, Ellen Symons also mentioned a few other great activities to bring the practice to, like during yoga, a massage, and even mowing the lawn.<\/p>\n

Seeking \u00a0ways to integrate mindfulness into your daily life will allow you to receive the benefits of meditation, and will benefit you even more if you already meditate.<\/b><\/p>\n

9. You can do any<\/i> task that doesn’t involve thinking, mindfully.<\/b><\/h2>\n

\"image.002\"When experimenting with different activities to bring mindfulness to, I found that some activities were easier to focus on than others. The main thing I discovered is that the less thinking an activity involves, the easier it is to be mindful of your actions<\/b>. If you’re looking for activities to bring mindfulness to, start with the ones that don’t involve a lot of thinking, like cleaning or washing the dishes.<\/p>\n

8. Meditation makes you way better at playing pool.\u00a0<\/b><\/h2>\n

Or any other sport, for that matter. Pool is a game (sport?) that requires incredible concentration, patience, mindfulness, and focus. Most days I play a solo game of pool to mull over ideas and plan things for A Year of Productivity, and I was surprised to find myself sinking more shots than ever during this experiment.<\/p>\n

A lot of people consider sports to be 90% mental and 10% physical, and I’m confident think\u00a0if you actively play sports, meditation will help you perform<\/b>. It’s no surprise that athletes like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, and many others all have a meditation ritual.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

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7. Meditation clears your brain’s RAM.<\/b><\/h2>\n

A computer’s RAM is like it’s short-term memory. By having a singular focus during meditation, you clear your mind of thought, which not only works out your ‘attention muscle’, but also clears your brain’s RAM.<\/p>\n

This by itself is a good enough reason to practice meditation. C<\/strong>learing your brain’s RAM reduces your stress and allows you to focus better throughout the day.<\/b><\/p>\n

6. Meditation lets you work smarter, instead of just harder.<\/b><\/h2>\n

During the experiment, I made sure to work as much as I could so I had a way to measure how meditation affected my productivity.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Interestingly, I found that meditation made it much easier for me to identify the highest leverage<\/span><\/a> activities in both my work and personal lives, which made it possible for me to work smarter, instead of just harder.<\/p>\n

I think there are two ways to get more done: put in more time and effort, which is a crappy way to get more done, or identify the highest leverage activities so you can work smarter instead of just harder. Meditation lets you step back from the things you do so you can see the ‘whole forest’ instead of just the trees, and work smarter instead of harder.<\/b><\/p>\n

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Integrating meditation and mindfulness into your everyday life is simple.<\/strong>\u00a0Mindfulness involves slowing down, and giving an activity your complete focus. Find an activity that does’t require a ton of thinking, and then slow way down and pay special attention to the actions your body and mind want to perform naturally. Boom! You’re now practicing mindfulness.<\/div><\/div>\n

Interlude: My 10 favorite productivity experiments from my year of productivity<\/b><\/h2>\n

10 of my favorite experiments<\/a><\/span> from my year of productivity, in no particular order. Just click on any picture to visit the experiment’s article.<\/p>\n

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