Mindfulness is simply paying attention to what is happening right now. In other words, mindfulness is simply paying attention to what you are doing right now.
So how do we use mindfulness to focus when we have multiple tasks to do?
Whatever we are doing right now, just do that.
What does that mean? In our busy work life and home life, we often have many things to do, many things competing for our attention.
Sometimes we find ourselves multitasking. But the truth about multitasking is that we are only truly working on one task at a time. Even though a computer appears to “multitask” really well, it is actually just working on one task (process) at a time, but switching extremely fast between the tasks.
So if the fact is that we can only work on one task at a time, why not do so completely and 100%?
When writing an email, just write an email 100%. When speaking during a meeting, just speak 100%. When eating lunch, just eat lunch 100%.
In my experience, what I often end up doing instead is: When I’m writing an email, I’m thinking about eating lunch. When I’m eating lunch, I’m thinking about the meeting. When I’m in the meeting, I’m thinking about writing an email.
What would it be like to do a task 100%? Come back to the breath, come back to whatever we are doing in this moment. When we are done with this task, we move on to the next task, and we do that 100%.
Of course it’s easier said than done, but we can try. We can try practicing mindfulness with every task we do. If we are writing an email and we start thinking about lunch, we can let go of the image of the yummy food, come back to our breath, and come back to the email.
Mindfulness FAQ 