Mindfulness at work

You don't need to meditate at the office. But you can work differently.

Multitasking is the number-one enemy of presence at work. Research from Stanford shows that "multitaskers" perform worse on each individual task than those who focus on one thing. The brain doesn't really multitask: it switches rapidly between tasks, with a cognitive cost at each transition.

Three simple practices for working with presence:

Notification-free time blocks. 90 minutes of deep work with notifications off. Everything else in processing blocks.

The pause between meetings. Two minutes before each meeting to breathe and arrive fully, not mentally finishing the previous one.

The closing question. At the end of the day: "What did I really do today?" Not what you got through, but what you accomplished with attention.