Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Mindfulness

Two-Minute Mentor #5: Present Perfect

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In “Awakening of the Heart” Vietnamese-French Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh offers a translation of the Bhaddekaratta Sutta:

Do not pursue the past.
Do not lose yourself in the future.
The past no longer is.
The future has not yet come.

Looking deeply at life as it
is in the very here and now,
the practitioner dwells
in stability and freedom.

We must be diligent today.
To wait until tomorrow is too late.
Death comes unexpectedly.
How can we bargain with it?

The quality of your life depends on how you live at this moment. Within the span of a few minutes, you may experience the darkest part of your life or the brightest. In one instant, you may suffer the painful pinpricks of stress; in the next, you may revel in the fullness and mystery of life.

By meditating on these experiences, you will realize that your memories and daydreams are actually illusory. They are not happening now; they are simply mental images flickering in the mind. Most of the strands of your mind’s apprehensions are fleeting and ultimately unimportant.

The first step towards achieving harmony, joy, happiness, and well-being is to recognize that your upheavals are nothing but your own mind’s projections. You are in control and can prevent yourself from being overwhelmed by them.

Mindfulness comes from paying attention to what you are doing right now and letting go of regrets, worries, and fears. Far greater joy is in the living process than in the outcome. Be in the moment.

Idea for Impact: Your past has created the present; create your future by focusing on the present.

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  4. Learn to Manage Your Negative Emotions and Yourself
  5. Death Should Not Be Feared

The Nature of Worry

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“When you stop to examine your thoughts you start to see that they have a life of their own, they come and go, generally in a random, idiosyncratic way. Recognizing the constancy of our endless thinking process is said to be one of the important early steps we take on the meditation path.”
—Bob Sharples, Do the Thoughts Ever Stop

Have you ever realized that most of your anticipated misfortunes never occur, that some of life’s difficult scenarios never come to pass, or that most of your worrying is ultimately fruitless and life goes on?

Below, I present a simple exercise to help you discover the lifecycle of worry. I encourage you to sit down at a quiet place, somewhere you can relax and reflect. If necessary, fetch yourself a journal, special notebook, or a piece of scratch paper.

Mindfulness Exercise

Consider a recent upheaval or stressful event. Go back in time and experience that moment for a minute. How do you feel? What preoccupies your mind?

Under the direct influence of your anguish, your mind is bewildered. You feel disoriented. Your mind is filled with apprehension. Bearing the burden of this stress, you cannot take your mind off the imagined ramifications. The wounds of your sorrow seem incurable.

Now, fast forward to a few days following the stressful event. What do you experience now? Your troubles no longer hold a grip on your life as before. You feel released from that moment’s immediate affliction. As you reflect the situation’s progress, you feel amazed by how your feelings have changed. What happened to the irreparable hardship?

Storms of Distress

Allow another interval of time to elapse. How do your feelings compare now? The original despair is diminished further. The event feels formless; your apprehensions are no longer recognizable. You may even find humor in your past misfortune.

A few days later, you are surprised by how easily these storms of distress passed. You wonder how these depressing emotions could have possessed you. The events are not undone and the external circumstances remain unchanged. What has changed is your mind’s condition?

Idea for Impact: “This too shall pass”

“Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.”
—Benjamin Franklin

It is your mind that relates external circumstances to your internal being. Joy and sorrow, hopes and despairs, elation and desolation, pleasures and annoyances are nothing but outcomes of your sensibility. Outside forces are challenging to conquer—our control over the exterior world is narrow, and merely illusory. However, the evolution of your thoughts and feelings and your responses to distressing situations are within your power.

The next time you experience a hardship—a conflict, a distressing situation, or annoyance, recall what happened with your prior hardships. Recognize that everything happening in your external environment is but impermanent. Say to yourself, “This too shall pass.”

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  3. Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue
  4. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  5. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be

How to Create More Time

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Blogger Carla Kay White reflects on how she “found time” by transforming her mindset about being overwhelmed.

… it occurred to me that I’m feeling overwhelmed because that’s precisely the message I’m putting out in the world. I repeat it all day long in different forms “I have no time…” or “I wish I could, but I’m busy…” or “gotta rush…”

But what would happen if I simply told myself, “I have all the time in the world”?

I repeated this to myself anytime I felt rushed. Someone stopped me to chat, I had time. Working late, no problem. Caught behind a slow driver, I chilled and enjoyed the view. In the end it actually worked. I created time.

By sending out a new message “I have time” I’m relaxing, finding a new rhythm and living in the moment. I’m focusing on one thing at a time instead of ten different things. As a result, I get more accomplished, do a better job, and truly do have more time.

So if you constantly feel overwhelmed, ask yourself—are you really? Or is it just a conditional thought that you repeated so often to yourself, you believe it and live it? Just maybe you too can magically create time through your thoughts.

How to Create More Time

The feeling of being overwhelmed is primarily a lack of sense of priority over what we need to do. Follow my three-step process for better time management.

  • Time Logging: Follow this simple exercise to develop an idea of how you spend time currently.
  • Time Analysis: Tally up your time logs, analyze how you actually use your time, and recognize non-productive tasks and activities.
  • Time Budgeting: Follow this simple process to list your life’s values and priorities. Then, create a time budget to help you center your actions on the truly important aspects of your life and career.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Make Time to Do it
  2. [Time Management #2] Time Logging: Log Where Your Time Actually Goes
  3. How to Clear Your Mental Horizon
  4. Plan Tomorrow, Plus Two
  5. Busyness is a Lack of Priorities

[Time Management #2] Time Logging: Log Where Your Time Actually Goes

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Preamble

This article is the second in a series of four articles that presents the basics of diagnosing how you tend to spend your time and how you can develop the discipline of spending your time on what really matters to you. Yesterday’s article established that effective time management is truly not about managing time as such; rather, it is about managing priorities. See full article here.

Log How You Spend Your Time

“Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.”
—Peter Drucker in ‘The Effective Executive’

Before you begin managing your time effectively, you need to develop an idea of how you spend time currently.

Below is a simple exercise to help you track how you use your hours and minutes during a suitably long period of time, ideally a whole week. If you follow a specific routine everyday, you may be able to approximate your time analysis by doing this exercise for a couple of weekdays and a Saturday or a Sunday. Alternatively, you may choose to do this only during your time at work. Again, more data leads to a more comprehensive analysis; hence, try to log an entire week.

Log where time actually goes---Time Log Template

  1. Create a simple chart that consists of four columns as in the above illustration. Column 1 contains labels for time intervals, in 10- or 15-minute increments. Column 2 records your activity. Column 3 identifies the project or purpose that activity served. Column 4 rates the effectiveness of time spent. Itemizing all these details is the key to identifying time wasted and time effectively used.
  2. Make as many photocopies of this chart as required for a whole week.
  3. Carry your time log charts around with you wherever you go. Record every activity—significant or insignificant, large or small—during the entire week. Include time spent at your morning ablutions, travel time, time spent chitchatting around the water cooler, time spent helping your daughter with homework, telephone time, time spent on the internet—your sleeping time too.

Time Log Forms

Here are two PDF forms you could download and use:

You need not necessarily stop every 10th or 15th minute to record your activity. You can fill up the relevant rows once every hour or so. If you spend two hours on an airplane, you can mark 12 rows (of 10 minutes each) with a single comment. You need not be very precise: if you spend 7 minutes on the phone with a customer, you can record spending an entire 10 minutes.

Here is what your log should look like.

Log where time actually goes---Time Log Example

Benefits of Time Logging

The immediate benefit of time logging is that it induces a sense of significance of your time. It compels you into the right mindset to consider habits you need to develop, avoid or change and start using your hours and minutes more effectively.

The more significant advantage is that your time logs will serve as a foundation for structuring your time according to your priorities and thus enable effective time management.

Tomorrow’s article will focus on time-analysis to help you review results from your time logs and prepare you for budgeting time according to your priorities.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Make Time to Do it
  2. How to Clear Your Mental Horizon
  3. How to Create More Time
  4. Plan Tomorrow, Plus Two
  5. Busyness is a Lack of Priorities

Mindfulness Meditation for Busy People: Stress-Beating Strategies

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Recently, while poking around the internet, I stumbled upon Lorraine Hahn’s interview of Swami Veda Bharati. In this CNN Talk Asia interview from 2002, Swamiji talks about the practice of yoga and meditation and their benefits.

A simple exercise in meditation

During the interview, Swamiji leads viewers into a few moments of meditation. The following simple steps are worth a try.

  1. Wherever you are, right now make no formal effort of any kind. Simply bring your awareness to the place where you are sitting.
  2. Be aware of yourself from head to toe. If your eyes close, let them close by themselves, lightly and simply relax your forehead.
  3. Just relax your forehead, be still and bring your awareness to your breathing. Only bring the awareness to your breathing. Do nothing with your breath, only follow how the breath is flowing.
  4. Pick a name of God or a name of the Buddha or Yahweh or the name of Jesus, in your language, according to your tradition. Exhaling, think in your mind that name without a break. Inhaling, think that name.
  5. Observe how the breaths, the mind and the name are flowing together as a single stream. Continue to feel the flow.
  6. Maintaining the awareness of the flow, gently open your eyes but continue to feel the flow even with your eyes open. Do you feel any change in the state of your mind? A little calmness?

Why meditate?

After several years of being “busy at college”, I recently restarted my practice of yoga and meditation. For me, meditation is a practice of discovering the existential truth and disciplining my thought and action. Meditation helps me deliberate on the fundamental questions of life: the purpose and meaning of life and my role in the complex web of relationships around me.

What does meditation mean to you? Given your traditions and beliefs, do you see a difference between meditation and prayer? Do you consider meditation as a means for inward reflection and spiritual development? Is it deliberation and deep thought in search for the ultimate truth? Or is it mere stress management work-out to help attain calmness and composure? What are your thoughts?

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