Working Remotely, Mindfulness and Focus

If you working remotely and find it difficult to concentrate and get things done? Do you feel your day goes and don’t have a clue of where the hours went?  Mindfulness is here to help you get focused and not distracted.

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From conversations with remote workers, I’ve seen the biggest challenges are:

• At home you have a lot of distractions that can make get you distracted on the work to be done
• Not being able to distinguish clearly work from personal life
• Wasting time and finding out at the end of the day no work has been done

My personal experience with Mindfulness has been that it enables to be more conscious of how the mind gets distracted by “flying away” and it also helps get your mind back to the present moment and the activity you are doing now.  On top of the many benefits it has on my day to day life, I’ve realised that Mindfulness is also helping get more work done faster and with less distractions when working remotely.

Some examples are:

• In the past I could jump from one page to another page to another page, and after a couple of hours feel guilty I lost my time without work being done.  With Mindfulness, when the process of jumping from one place to another in the internet comes, it’s easier to detect the pattern and stop it, and go back to my daily to do list
• In the past multi tasking was something that happened regularly.  Trying to attend a meeting while answering mails and checking personal whatsapp.  Not any more.  Mindfulness teaches to focus on one thing at a time, and not let the mind get into too many things at the same time.
• Monitor emotions and not take them too seriously.   In the past I could get caught in emotional turmoil, I can detect if faster and get out faster.

Of course, mindfulness is not the solution to all the problems of remote working.  On to mindfulness you need to add prioritisation of the activities you have to do during the day, and also pragmatic scheduling of those into your agenda.  But that is left for another post.  For the time being, be clear that Mindfulness can help you if working remotely, and will benefit in spite of not following any of the mentioned in this paragraph.

If you think you don´t have time for Mindfulness, think twice, and make the time.  The remaining of your day after the practice will have more focus, clarity and presence.