Time
It is my custom to practice mindfulness. I had a wonderful opportunity to spend a few days at a place called Deer park Monastery. This was 21/2–3 years ago. It was an a amazing experience. Basically you live as the monks do in the community. Meditating, working, exercising and eating with the monks. Best vegan food I have ever eaten and much of it was grown on their garden.
Mindfulness in the “Real World” can be a little mor difficult to practice. In mindfulness the idea is to be fully present with what you are doing in any given moment. It seems that this is a problem for people in your life who expect you to multitask, or drop everything and change your focus for them.
When I am in the middle of my focus, inevitably I find other people are an interruption, with phone calls or questions. We are trained in western society to jump to if the phone rings or someone comes to our desk with a question. There have been many studies recently finding that trying to multitask is essentially slowing down people. Interruptions add hours to the day. It takes time to swing your focus back and forth and you actually accomplish less than you would focusing on one thing at a time in the same hours.
So know if I am busy, I don’t answer the phone. But I will call you back or answer in some way when I finish the task at hand.