The term “mindfulness” is often used hand in hand, or even synonymously, with “meditating,” and for good reason–mindfulness meditation is one of the most longstanding and widely-used techniques for practicing mindfulness. Â It isn’t, however, the only way. Â In Buddhist teaching it is said that there are 84,000 doors to enlightenment. Â Here I’ll mention just five:
Receiving a reminder of an upcoming meeting or task from our smartphones can be a great way to remember to be somewhere to get something done on time. Â All too often, however, our smartphones beep, flash, and vibrate at us every few minutes to provide us with information we don’t really need. Â And we know that regaining our attention after such a distraction can take ten minutes or more, particularly if we were engaged in deep thought when interrupted.
Do you feel like you spend more of your day responding to messages than living? Â Do you need to turn off your smartphone at work and hide in a closet just to get “real” work done? Â If so, you may be suffering from messaging fatigue.
One source of this ailment is the need–whether perceived or real–to respond immediately to messages we receive. We feel that if someone sends us a message and we don’t respond immediately, something horrible will happen–we’ll lose a customer, damage a friendship, miss out on an opportunity.
When I first began to use email in earnest, while a student at MIT in the early 1990s, writing and reading emails had much the same feeling as writing and reading handwritten letters. Â By far the easiest way to write an email was to go to one of a small number of computer clusters on campus and log in to a computer terminal. Â The people I sent email messages to were few and far between, and they also had relatively infrequent access to an email-enabled computer. Â So if you sent an email to someone, you expected that they might not read it and respond for at least a few days, if not much longer. Â All of this encouraged the writing of messages that were relatively long and that provided information that could be quite out of date, much like a handwritten letter.
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