The Surprising Way Meditation Makes You More Productive

In a world where productivity reigns supreme, the idea of sitting still and doing nothing can feel like a sacrilege. But what if that very stillness could unlock your highest potential? For action-driven individuals, the idea of meditating - or sitting still, closing your eyes, and accomplishing nothing - seems wildly counterproductive. Yet it is not a coincidence that top performers like Fortune 500 CEOs and elite athletes swear by it. They have discovered something that most of us miss: meditation is not about doing nothing, it's about training your mind to focus on one thing, and in a world filled with distractions, that's a superpower.

In addition to enhancing focus, meditation has been linked to reducing stress and improving decision-making. Perhaps one of the best-known examples is MBSR or Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course which has become a clinical and a scientific standard demonstrating consistent stress reduction and depression management across numerous studies. Another example is a study published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) demonstrating that brief mindfulness meditation improves attention allocation in novices.?This enhanced allocation of attention could indirectly lead to better decision-making by allowing individuals to focus more effectively on relevant information.

Meditation can be daunting for a beginner as there are numerous ways to meditate and even the concept of "meditation" is often conflated with "mindfulness". If you look around, some people practice mindfulness, some people meditate and there are even those who practice mindful meditation.

In reality, mindfulness is the act of being aware of the present moment, preferably in a non-judgmental way. It means being acutely aware of your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and bodily sensations. Meditation is a structured practice that cultivates mindfulness, concentration and other mental states.

In the context of this article, meditation practice boils down to being able to hold your attention on one and only one thing while being fully aware of that process. That one thing can be an action like driving or walking, a mental object like an image, or an emotion like a feeling of gratitude. This type of meditation is deceptively difficult to practice as the mind naturally tends to wander from one thought to another. The entire practice consists of gently bringing the mind to the object of concentration anytime it drifts away, over and over again. That's why meditating is akin to doing mental pushups. When you refocus the mind on the object of concentration, you improve your concentration muscles. Going to the mental gym of meditation pays huge dividends in terms of productivity.

So how does meditation tie into our most precious commodity - time? Let's explore why so many of us feel that 24 hours isn't enough in the day, and how meditation can help reclaim some of that time. Despite all the recent turmoil in the world, those who live in developed countries arguably live in the best era humanity has ever known. We have instant access to information on a device the size of the palm of a hand, we have easy access to food and safe shelter. We are inoculated from deadly diseases that used to wreak havoc on populations in the past and a large portion of the population no longer needs to break their backs to earn a living. We have it so good that we even go to the gym to dump excess energy from the extra calories we consume from overeating. We no longer have to spend hours by the river bank handwashing our clothes and waste time in queues when running errands.

In theory, we are supposed to have lots of extra time, yet in practice, we cry out for more hours in the day. So much for progress and innovation! The time is there - it's just buried beneath layers of distractions. This is where meditation can help reclaim it.

One extremely pragmatic way of looking at meditation is to treat it as a tool for increasing productivity, an instrument that helps us do more with less. However, it is a somewhat limited way of looking at it. The real power of meditation as it relates to achieving productivity gains lies in its ability to create clarity around priorities. In other words, meditation helps discern between the must-haves and the nice-to-haves that occupy the mind space.

Meditation trains us to keep the focus on the must-haves and discard the nice-to-haves, so we end up directing energy to the things that matter, things that move the needle, things that we refer to as "Big Rocks". If you are not familiar with the Big Rocks metaphor, it comes from the idea that if you fill a glass jar with sand first (small, unimportant tasks), there won't be room for the big rocks (or tasks that truly matter). But if you prioritize the big rocks first, the sand can fill the space around them. This is how you become truly productive - meditation gives you the mental clarity to focus your limited cognitive resources on the few important things that drive big results.

In her book "Stress Less, Accomplish More: Meditation for Extraordinary Performance " Emily Fletcher draws a smart analogy between the mind with its incessant thinking and multiple open tabs in a web browser. Just like your favourite browser, you have many thought processes open at any given point in time. One tab is dedicated to the next meeting and how best to prepare for it. Another tab contains information on what ingredients to purchase for tonight's dinner and another tab keeps track of your child's busy baseball schedule. Some tabs are not dedicated to activities at all, they exist to remind you how scared you are to confront a difficult colleague or how satisfying it was to flip a finger at that rude driver who cut you off on a highway earlier today.

When we meditate, we let the browser tabs open in our mind's view just long enough to click the "X" button to close them forever. In essence, the meditation practice is like a garbage collection routine that cycles through the open tabs in our mind and closes them one by one, until there are no more tabs left. The process of mentally opening a tab and clicking the close button requires a certain degree of practice and can be frustrating at first since not all tabs render themselves to closing. At first, some tabs will refuse to close - they will distract you by pointing your attention to other, even more persistent tabs. But with daily practice (most CEOs report meditating at least once a day), those tabs will become fewer and less powerful, leaving your mind clearer and more focused.

And that's where the magic trick of meditating for productivity happens. Firstly, with fewer tabs to worry about, the mind becomes less distracted and can focus on the current task. This directly translates into the ability to focus the entirety of our attention on whatever we are doing in the present moment and truly put a "world-class" effort into it. And secondly, with most of the useless tabs discarded, only the most important tabs remain. These tabs usually refer to the most impactful things you can do, actions that move the needle and produce big results in the long run. For instance, investing thirty minutes of your time learning a new skill to land a higher-paying job or learning a new language so that you can move to a new country (and exercise your brain to prevent premature aging)!

So the truth is, meditation does not waste your time - it gives you back control. By clearing mental clutter and sharpening focus, you'll find that the same 24 hours stretch farther, allowing you to accomplish more of what truly matters.