An Insight on Daily Meditation
Software development without focus? Good luck with that. Too much focus? That’s not so great either.
On any given productivity medium (blog, book or podcast) someone is going to recommend to you that daily meditation is an absolute “must do.” “Changed their life!” “Made them able to earn their first million dollars in 18-months with a new-born child in the aftermath of a horrendous tsunami.”
Now everyone is different in their own minds, they perhaps don’t have a “need” for meditation, but they might understand it better if it were explained as something not called “meditation.”
If not “meditation” what are you doing?
Most people fixate on meditation on “something” — perhaps trying to focus all their attention on the “blue lamp” or the “candle” across the room from them. Some forms of meditation seek to isolate the mind from all external stimulus in the form of willed sensory deprivation or a pleasant head-trip floating inside of a warm and dark tank filled with super-saturated epsom salt water. Sometimes it is a a repeated chant looped over and over and looped and over and over so you can’t looped over and over think over and over looping about over and over things. So we have multiple methods of trying to control the mind’s… distraction. For we’re pattern-recognition machines, always searching and always planning.
“Distractation” is what I’m calling it
Set aside some time — in a quiet place — because what the practice is about is noticing when you are distracted, internally. Suddenly, you think, “Did I check the oil this week in my car?” Distraction.
“What about the radiator fluid.”
Distraction.
What are you going to do about it? You can’t do anything about it right now, you’re busy doing your distractation practice — and succeeding! How?
You’re catching the expensive loss of focus in your mind before it ruminates and derails your day. Notice that feeling that someone or something is pulling on your ability to decide “what’s the next action?” Hold on to that. What you want to sense from your mind is when it is about to go off on the next adventure. Remember that it is really easy to fool yourself that you’re thinking about what you’re supposed to be thinking (multitasking etc.) unless you have trained to notice when your thinking has shifted contexts.
The Disability of Hyperfocus
Most people will not have this problem, for others, you know who you are.
If you don’t have the ADHD “super-power/super-disability” of “hyperfocus” — I consider it a power and a disability — your mind probably has all kinds of interruptions internally. The “disability” of hyperfocus is getting stuck in a flow-state — when time disappears and great and powerful thought explodes effortlessly — and writing code for 18-hours continuously at the neglect of health, family and friends. This is the opposite problem of distractation, the ability to be distracted is completely shut off and the mind levers itself on one very interesting problem. Phones can ring and you won’t even hear them. Rainstorms can buffet the home and you will only notice that somehow the ground is wetter now than you remember earlier.
For those with this problem, we have to practice unfocusing so that we can better interact with other people around us — so we have to notice that we’re not distracted as opposed to distracted.
Set an alarm and feel an appreciation for recognition of mental change
Do it for five to ten minutes and enjoy the feeling of knowing that your mind’s immense power is attempting to switch to something more interesting or concerning than what you are wishing to do right now — and you can use that to become more productive. And for those of us with the opposite problem, maybe what we need is a wrist-band taser that shocks us every 25 minutes if we don’t solve a captcha during periods of extreme hyperfocus — but then I know, we might even be able to flow past that except for the problem of not being able to type with the wristbanded hand.
