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A (practical) spiritual practice for managing "busy" and getting good work done

My wife, Deborah Neale, coached the founder of Apiwraps in the early years as she built her business and we’re avid supporters to this day. Freya writes a monthly letter (an actual, physical letter!) to her customers every month. This month she talked about the micro in the macro and I loved her advice so much I’ve done some research, and been practicing it.. and it makes a difference.

As a way of managing the ‘busy’, she invites us to focus on a single task to the exclusion of all others and then do it until it is done. This means taking everything out of your environment that is not that task and entering the ‘zen bubble’ of doing one thing with all your attention.

There’s a whole bunch of neuroscience behind this idea. There is also some powerful philosophy and spiritual science: the idea that the human ability to think and act independently of physical nature is an important path to spiritual knowledge (a challenge to the conception that intellectual activity is not, in itself, a spiritual activity). In fact, deep, focused thinking is akin to meditation and has many of the same results and benefits.

For this thinking to be truly healing and have a spiritual nature (and produce better results) the key is that it is focused.

You can’t be thinking of three (or ten) things at once or have your brain distracted as emails come in (which just happened to me ☹). That takes some discipline and a commitment to excluding things from your space: shut down Outlook, write a To-Do list and then put it aside, shut the door… whatever it takes.

I invite you to try it… you get good work done ad you feel calmer and more connected rather than frenetic and overwhelmed

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