We at Vyte offer a better way to schedule meetings. Through this, we also feel a responsibility to provide you with material about being more mindful in general but especially about your time and commitments. So today’s post will be about meditation (being more mindful) and saying no (being more mindful about your time).

Believe it or not – meditating for 10 minutes can change your whole day. For a long time, I have been fairly skeptical about this. It just seemed so vague and hard to understand.

Then I tried Headspace for the first time. Every session takes 10 minutes, so an amount of time everyone has during the day – and it is so worth it. You may not notice it on day 1 or day 2. But after a streak over a couple days, you are more mindful about your decisions, calmer, less anxious, more focused and more creative – sounds good, right?!

But what happens in our brain to make that happen? Well, scientists have found out that the overall difference is that our brain stops processing information as actively as it normally would. The amount of beta waves (indicator of information processing) starts to decrease during meditation. Here is a picture of a brain before and after a session:

meditation
As you can see, the effect is huge!
I highly recommend getting into this behavior! It helped me a lot and it can do the same for you. You can get some more information about the effects of meditation right here.

With meditation, you are setting the groundstone to be more mindful in general. In the second part of the post we are now looking into how you can do this with your time commitments.

Have you read “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less” by Greg McKeown? If not, you should! I got a lot of learnings out of this book. The basic concept is about saying “no” more often. At first, it sounds easy but when you think deeper it really isn´t. I think everyone has said “yes” to someone just to please them, although you didn’t really have time to help. Being willing to help is a great thing but at first, you always should think about how saying yes would affect your own agenda. If it cuts out too much of your time, saying “no” is definitely an okay thing to say. People won´t like you less because of that, they will probably value your time and commitment, even more, when you say yes next time. But how to say no gracefully?

Step 1: Affirm the relationship: “It´s great to hear from you!”

Step 2: Thank the person for the opportunity: “Thank you so much for thinking of me! It sounds like such a brilliant project.”

Step 3: Decline politely: “For several reasons, I need to pass on at the moment.”

Saying no might be one of the most useful skills because it gives you time and energy for the projects and tasks that matter right now.

essentialism

I hope you gained some inspiration from this. What are your ways to be more mindful about your time commitments? Drop us a line in the comments to let us know 🙂