Want amazing productivity? It’s all in your mind with meditation.

Productivity benefits of meditation could very well take your career to the next level, boost the bottom line of your business, or free up your time to do other things in life outside of work. Does that all sound too good to be true? Well it’s not and here’s a few reasons why.

We mentioned this one in our Meditation and Your Brain blog as well, but it is definitely worth covering again. Let’s face it, a wandering mind is absolutely awful for productivity. Regularly, you may find that you pause in the middle of your work day, just for a brief few moments, but then struggle to get back on track soon afterwards. Meditation is not going to stop your mind from wandering, as that’s just a normal part of life. However, it is going to make it far easier to get back to the task at hand through an improved ability to centre your thoughts on the present moment. Resulting in less down time, and more work time.

An improved memory is another area that has the potential to supercharge your productivity. How often do you find yourself talking to a fellow staff member and say something along the lines of, “I don’t remember getting that email” only to spend the next 5 minutes finding the email that was sent and re-reading it to finally get the full message. Or maybe, “Fred had a great idea about that the other day, but I can’t for the life of me remember exactly what he said, let me go check with him”. You then try to find Fred (he’s not at his desk), asking where he is and when he’ll get back (interrupting someone else who is in the middle of something), and playing phone tag with him before finally catching up and getting the idea from him a day later. Just in these 2 examples alone, a fair chunk of time could easily be saved if the individuals had better memories. How much time would you save if you could improve your memory?

It also doesn’t require years of meditation to achieve measurable results. A couple of studies that show this are, “Mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering” which was based on a 2 week meditation trial and another study showed that even after only 4 meditations sessions, participants had “significantly improved visuo-spatial processing, working memory, and executive functioning”.

Creativity is another area where certain types of meditation may be helpful. This study shows how different meditation techniques help divergent thinking (where many possible solutions are sought for the same problem) as compared to focused attention (being on a single thought or object). In both cases, productivity could be given a boost depending on what results you are after by tailoring your meditation to suit.

Are you a manager that can see your staff on the path to burnout? Are you an employee who is at the end of your tether? Transcendental Meditation has been shown to reduce the psychological distress of teaches and support staff over a 4 month period in one trial. The lead author of the study, Dr. Charles Elder, MD, MPH, noted, “The results of this randomized controlled trial are very striking and demonstrate the utility of introducing a stress reduction program for teachers and other public and private employees. The four-month study found significant and clinically important decreases in perceived stress, emotional exhaustion associated with teacher burnout, and depressive symptoms in those practicing the TM program compared to a wait-list control group.”

So you want to fire up your productivity to take the next step in your career? Boost the performance of your staff to take your business to the next level? Get more done around the house so you can free up valuable time with the family? Then maybe look at introducing meditation into your daily routine and you could well become a productivity star!