August 2015

Mind Over Matter: the Zen Approach to Innovation and Productivity  

Mindfulness practice has permeated many aspects of Western culture – from stress-reduction therapy to everyday business practices. Mindfulness is an approach to increasing awareness of oneself and one’s surroundings. Mindfulness practice began with Buddhist meditation but is being adapted to fit the more clinical and secular needs of Western treatment centers and workplaces. Here’s how mindfulness is being implemented today and how it could make your workday a little brighter.

Achieving effortless attention

The cornerstone of mindfulness is nonjudgmental observation. It entails perceiving the context of a situation without attaching any emotions to the events unfolding. Much like Zen, which emphasizes the value of meditation and intuition, mindfulness is about eliminating the clutter, finding balance, and getting to the core of what you’re presented with.

Jeremy Hunter, assistant professor at the Peter F. Drucker School of Management, told The Wall Street Journal, “Mindfulness should be at the center of business schools’ teaching … because it is about improving the quality of attention, and in the modern workplace, attention is the key to productivity.” The belief is that attentiveness can be strengthened through mindfulness and meditation practice.

Being in touch with spontaneity

Journalist Warren Berger, who’s written extensively on the subject and talked with various Silicon Valley executives, writes: “Zen practitioners are taught to remain attentive and ‘mindful,’ even during life’s mundane moments—an approach that also helps design researchers and ethnographers gather observations and insights on everyday behavior and needs.” The result is small but pivotal insights that move the individual (or the company) forward.

According to Randy Komisar, a Zen practitioner who’s also a partner with the Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Zen practice “is about stripping away one’s biases, prejudices, blindness. It is about realizing the essence of things.” The belief is that through meditation and mindfulness, people open themselves up to having those a-ha! moments that spark innovation.

Honoring the practice

While Zen meditation and mindfulness can certainly boost mental health, creativity, and productivity, it’s important to remember that’s not the sole purpose of these practices. This dilemma is perfectly captured in The Economist’s Schumpeter column:

“The biggest problem with mindfulness is that it is becoming part of the self-help movement—and hence part of the disease that it is supposed to cure. Gurus talk about ‘the competitive advantage of meditation.’ Pupils come to see it as a way to get ahead in life. And the point of the whole exercise is lost.”

Mindfulness won’t help you crush your competition—but it can help you and your colleagues bring greater clarity to the workday by raising awareness of yourself and your surroundings. To get started, check out this feature piece on mindfulness and business. Begin to integrate elements of these practices into your day whenever possible. Remember, it’s not how much you do; it’s how consistently you do it.

If you’ve worked in an office, you know there are often many obstacles to productivity. Whether it’s too many interruptions, a loud coworker, or just poor communication – there are things, specific to the work environment, that detract from your ability to work. Over the years, office spaces have evolved to suit modern working styles, but there are still inefficiencies that need to be ironed out. Here’s a look at where we’ve been, where we’re going, and how these changes will impact workplace productivity.

Yesterday

Ever work in a traditional office? One with doors and walls or a cubicle farm with rows and rows of semi-partitioned spaces? Does the thought of working in one make you anxious and trigger feelings of isolation and confinement. If so, you’re not alone.

In 1993 Dr. Francis Duffy and Jack Tanis wrote: “We are in danger of continuing to build offices that are more suitable for the first decades of this century than for the next.” According to Duffy and Tanis, traditional office spaces are “more capable of suffocating initiative than of stimulating invention,” and they worked toward building new physical spaces that gave employees “the maximum freedom to use all their talents.”

Today

Around that time open-plan offices, in which people work in large, open spaces with few physical barriers, were rising in popularity. The idea was that this would increase collaboration, creativity, and productivity. Open layouts are meant to encourage a sense of group togetherness and make employees feel like part of a more relaxed, creative enterprise.

As Maria Konnikova wrote in The New Yorker on open offices, “Psychologically, the repercussions of open offices are relatively straightforward. Physical barriers have been closely linked to psychological privacy, and a sense of privacy boosts job performance.” So while the open layout is beneficial for working together, it diminishes the quality of individual work.Today, it’s estimated that 70 percent of all offices are open-plan. In some ways, it’s improved collaboration and communication in the workplace. At the same time, it’s done little to enhance creativity and, in many instances, has negatively impacted productivity. In one study, people reported not having enough privacy and being distracted by too much noise.

Tomorrow

Most offices won’t revert back to traditional office spaces. Open-office layouts allow more people to work per square inch, reducing the amount of total office space needed. So how can you blend traditional and open-office floor plans to get a modern workspace appropriate for how people work today?

The key is to create an office space without barriers that can also be private. Given the increase in mobile devices used in the office, it’s important to have a flexible work environment where people can move around and work in different places. One way is having private breakout rooms where a person or a small group of people can work together. Other solutions include alcove sofas and workbays to break up an open space and provide workers with more private options.

The challenge for tomorrow will be designing a space that creates a feeling of psychological privacy but is also flexible enough that people can easily move around and collaborate. With technology enabling a more grab and go work style, we need workspaces to reflect that increased flexibility. How has the way you work changed and how has your workplace evolved (or not evolved) in response?

Driving us to distraction: the top 5 time-sucks in the office

The genius that happens every day in the offices of the world requires a certain amount of focus. Unfortunately, most offices are awash with both physical and mental distractions that pull our attention away from the task at hand. To help you identify common pitfalls, we’ve zeroed in on the top five productivity killers in the modern age. Better still, we gathered expert advice on ways to block out the noise and get to work.

1. Social media
Rieva Lesonsky, CEO of GrowBiz Media & com, admits her primary distraction is self-inflicted. “Social media can take me off task, especially Twitter. (I’m addicted.)”

RELATED: The science of cuteness: how looking at baby animals increases productivity

It happens to the best of us. You’re at a lull in your work, and you get that nagging sensation that something amazing might be happening on Facebook. Why not take a quick peek, just to make sure the world’s not passing you by? These brief breaks may seem harmless enough, but making compulsive social media checks during the day can add up to hours a week of lost time.

Instead of checking Facebook or Twitter throughout the day, try scheduling your social media time after lunch and limit it to 15 minutes. Having a special time slot for checking out the latest hijinks of Grumpy Cat will leave the rest of your day free for more productive endeavors. And if you really can’t help trying to scratch that itch, consider blocking your most visited social websites with your browser’s security settings.

2. A crazy commute
If you live or work in a large city, the morning commute can be an exercise in extreme frustration. What should be a 15-minute drive can turn into an hour or more of unproductive stress during rush hour.

Fortunately, thanks to cloud computing, working remotely is easier than ever. With web-based software and collaboration tools, office workers can get everything done even when they’re miles away from home base. More and more, corporate leaders are warming up to the idea of telecommuting as remote employees report higher productivity and morale. Even if you can’t work remotely all the time, you may be able to slightly shift your work schedule so you’re not traveling at rush hour, or just handle the first hour of your workday from home before you hop in the car.

3. Loud-mouthed colleagues
Who can’t relate to this scenario: you’re just settling in for some hard-core focus time to bang out a monthly report when the guy in the next cubicle starts in on a high-volume recap of last night’s episode of Game of Thrones—and you haven’t seen it yet (spoiler alert!). Working in an office can be great for collaboration and easy communication, but not so great when you’re doing focused solo work. Diplomatic requests for quiet might buy you a few minutes of peace, but let’s be realistic: some people do not possess an inside voice. Treat yourself to a pair of noise-canceling headphones and crank your favorite background tunes or soothing sounds from a white-noise website like Noisli.

4. The unfocused workday
You may have a truckload of work, but without a clear plan of attack, you may leave the office that night wondering what you got done and why you spent time on the wrong tasks. Ramon Ray of Smart Hustle Magazine zeroes in on the root of the problem. “Lack of clear understanding and planning. When I’m clear and highly organized, things flow!”

Jeff Marcoux, CMO lead for Worldwide Enterprise Marketing at Microsoft, agrees. “Randomization is the killer of productivity.” To get his house in order, he spends the first 10 minutes of his day making an explicit to-do list, following guidelines set out in this Harvard Business Review article. If you have trouble organizing your tasks, check out a mobile productivity tool like ToDoist or LeanKit.

5. Email
It’s impossible to avoid in the modern workplace, but email is as much a hindrance as it is a help. Andy Karuza, owner of BrandBuddee, notes, “being ‘too connected’ can be a major productivity killer. This is because task switching wastes lots of time from having to reset your train of thought and pick up where you left off on the previous task.”

Your email inbox forces you to switch focus from your task at hand, wasting precious minutes of your targeted energy. Karuza suggests taking a structured approach. “Answer emails and social media messages together at the top of the hour. Knock them all out at once and then wrap yourself up again in that Excel spreadsheet you were working on.”

You may also be doing work that is better done by a machine. Try to automate some basic email tasks to help you prioritize your inbox so those sprints of replying to email are as efficient as possible.

Whether you’re working from home or at the office, there’s always something there to distract you. Identifying your own biggest distractions is the first step to eliminating them. How do you conquer your workday productivity killers?