Mindful busyness

I've read two good books this month: Mindful Tech: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives by David M. Levy and The One Who Is Not Busy: Connecting with Work in a Deeply Satisfying Way by Darlene Cohen.

On the surface of things, I live a simplified, streamlined life. But when it comes to mental clutter, I have plenty. Yes, I take refuge in the idea that creative people have messy minds, but I also know that mess creates stress. So I'm open to ideas, tools, and practices that can help me declutter my brain and work style as successfully as I've decluttered my life. Mindful Tech has already helped me.

Levy has spent a career in the information sciences, but he also has studied calligraphy and bookbinding. Since 2001, he's been a professor at the University of Washington's Information School, where, as he writes on the UW website, "I have mainly been investigating the challenge of achieving contemplative balance–how as individuals and as a society we might live healthy, reflective, and productive (lives) while participating in an accelerating, information-saturated culture."

In other words, Levy doesn't advocate that we unplug from our devices. He suggests that we pay more attention to how we are when we're online: whether the sight of a full email inbox makes us hyperventilate, whether we get into a pleasant state of flow or an anxious fear of missing out when we surf around social media, whether our muscles tense when an alert tone sounds on our phone, whether I ignore the bell that nudges me to stand up, stretch, and breathe.

The passage of the book that spoke most deeply to me is one in which Levy quotes a trio of psychologists (Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale) on a shift from "doing mode" to "being mode."

Here's the difference: Being mode "is characterized by a sense of freedom, freshness, and unfolding of experience in new ways. It is responsive to the richness and complexity of the unique patterns that each moment presents." In doing mode, on the other hand, "the multidimensional nature of experience is reduced primarily to a unidimensional analysis of its standing in relation to a goal state."

Bingo! As a journalist, I've been dwelling in doing mode for my entire professional life. Deadlines are the "goal state," and I'm comfortable there, when I need to be. However, when I add ceaseless heaps of administrative work to the mix, it's really hard to be in "being mode" for any length of time.

That's why a mention of Darlene Cohen's book in Levy's work was intriguing to me. The One Who Is Not Busy seems less a title than a mirage. Is such a state really possible to achieve in today's work world? Indeed, Cohen -- who passed away in 2011 -- published this book in 2004: pre-Great Recession, pre-widespread disruption, pre-Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. A dozen years later, companies are expecting ever more of their employees, and we're more distracted than ever.

In a chapter titled "Living Seamlessly," Cohen plays a similar chord to the one that most struck me in Mindful Tech. If we can give each activity our full attention, she writes, life becomes more than ticking off tasks on a list. Usually, she adds, we're preoccupied with the goal, "the 'why' of our activity. If we can soften the exclusively goal-specific focus that we usually bring to our work concerns and start to pay attention not just to what furthers our goals but to everything inside us and around us, we have vastly enlarged our own playing field." And I sense that play really is an operative word here. Many of us take our work far too seriously.

Cohen offers a menu of complicated exercises that would probably work better via an audiobook (and I plan to record a few as voice memos to give them a try), yet her advice essentially boils down to "one thing at a time" and staying in the present moment. We may be super busy, but she says that if we can practice two core skills -- 1) the ability to narrow or widen the mind's focus at will and 2) the ability to shift focus from one thing to another (from "narrow" to "narrow" to "narrow"), we can improve the quality of our work lives, no matter how manic or mundane they may be.

Levy's aim is more straightforward: to help readers pay attention and be more intentional about our tech use. Since his book is brand new, he's more mindful of the increased demands on our time and mental bandwidth.

Paying attention and being more intentional are things we can all do. Even those tasks are huge and take practice, but the alternative is sleepwalking through life.