You can find courses for it everywhere online – mindfulness for well-being, mindfulness for anxiety, mindfulness for education, and – last but not least – mindfulness for business. To sci-fi geeks it’s nothing new. Those guys all discovered mindfulness the Jedi way, back in the 80s. Yoda’s one-liners teaching Luke on Dagobah are more than just quirky scriptwriting: they’re pretty much the essence of mindfulness, and finally, the world has caught on.
When applied to the workplace, mindfulness focuses on decluttering your mind so that you can work effectively, and without unnecessary stress. At its core, mindfulness debunks our global obsession with multi-tasking.
See, here’s the thing – listen up. Multi-tasking doesn’t work.
The mind, it appears, is linear. It can only pay full attention to one thing at a time. Interrupt it in the middle of something complex, (i.e. multi-task) and your mind is forced to make a three- or four-second ‘attentional blink’ as it switches to the new project. We’ve all experienced it. That ‘blank’ when someone in the room speaks to you while you’re already on a tough phone call. The typos created by reading an alert while you’re writing an email. We could go on.
Added up over the day, all those thousands of attentional blinks, created by complex multi-tasking, will chew up a couple of hours’ prime work time. And to make things worse, we make time-consuming mistakes during these blinks too. We put car keys down without making a mental note, make miscalculations, knock things over. All little errors that need fixed. Cumulatively, they can make us feel stressed or out of control. Or both.
In stark contrast to multi-tasking, mindfulness invites us to concentrate fully on one thing at a time, keeping your mind firmly in the present, not on the ‘next’. It encourages us back to older, linear ways of working – to absorption, to clearer desks, and to switching off push alerts that ping into peripheral vision while you’re doing something else.
isCompliant’s intelligent software rationalises your business life into one, organised and visual dashboard with every aspect in its proper place. All your important stuff is stored securely in the cloud, from meeting minutes to HR documentation, to timesheets, to Health & Safety legislation – and the rest. Whether you are striving for compliance certification or simply trying to run a ship-shape business, isCompliant will help you switch attention from one task to the next more efficiently. Methodical, progressive, and systematic.
So it’s time to clear your desk of cluttered files, piles and post-its. Buy some plants instead. isCompliant will remind you what needs doing – but at a time that suits you. No more chaos, no more lost files, no more conflicting priorities. With isCompliant you will control your business, rather than be a victim of it. Stop firefighting, and start working. It’s the Jedi way.
Sound good? Well you can try isCompliant for 30 days, absolutely free! Sign up now.
