Multichannel mindfulness
June 30th, 2009 by Hugh Kennedy
Two weeks in Europe, two days back at the agency. If anything can convince you that you’ve got chronic ADD, it’s comparing your schedule in Sorrento on a Saturday (or swanning through Positano on a Wednesday) with your first ten hours back behind the desk. With Twitter, Yammer, email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, snail mail, IMs, voice mail, and more channels being suggested and friended to you every hour, and all of them making claims on your time before you’ve even engaged with a client, it’s easy to feel weighed down and hopelessly behind the 8-ball.
In the spirit of dialing things back, I found a passage in Garr Reynolds very fine book Presentation Zen in a chapter called (with pun intended) The Art of Being Completely Present. It already has helped me focus on that most difficult of challenges in our age of continuous partial attention: doing one thing at a time and really enjoying the experience:
“Meditation is not an escape from reality at all, and in fact even everyday routines can be methods for meditation. When you have an awareness that your actions and judgments are usually just automatic reactions based on a sort of running dialogue that you have in your head, then you are free to let go of such judgments. So, rather than hating washing the dishes, you just wash the dishes. When you write a letter, you write a letter. And when you give a presentation, you give a presentation. Mindfulness is concerned with the here and now and having an awareness of this particular moment. You want to see this moment as it is without your ordinary filters, filters that are concerned only with the past (or future) and of how things should or will be and so on….In our daily lives and in our work lives, including presenting, we’ve got to clear our minds and be only one place: right here.”
I love this phrase: “even everyday routines can be methods for meditation.” As we ramp up an ethnographies project here at the agency, it reminds me of a wonderful article from BusinessWeek on daily rituals, defined series of actions that allow us to move from one emotional state to another.
In any case, here’s to being right where you are, and enjoying how that feels.
July 1st, 2009 at 7:55 am
Hugh,
Love the post. Might Multi-channel mindfulness be the antidote to Continuous Partial Attention?
July 6th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Thanks for the post Hugh. It’s just what I need on a Monday morning as I try to re-orient myself to work.