Max Riffner

The Parlor

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Mindfully

I was reading the Merlin Mann interview today on Life Hacker, which goes in depth with his love for Getting Things Done (ironically collecting dust on my pile of books to read). Mann went on to talk about how he’s mindfully accomplishing his tasks also:

There’s another modest change that I actually struggle not to yak about constantly on the site (since it really cheeses off the “How can I put my pants on faster?!?� crowd). But I’ve really focused my time over the past few months on learning and trying to practice mindfulness in my everyday stuff. I’m absolutely the worst buffet Buddhist ever, but at least I’m aware of that. Which apparently counts for something.

This is something that I will be talking about much more on the site as I get a better handle on what it all means — exploring not just how it relates to “productivity,” but looking at how people are hooking mindfulness and dharma practice up to things like cognitive therapy and even unix computing. It’s fascinating stuff to me. Whole new world.

Ever since I’ve started yoga with Ben, I’ve noticed I’ve been paying closer attention to how I do things. After some conditioning, you can do a pose no problem. However, mindfully doing a pose, taking time to assess your current mood and physicality while gracefully entering in and out of it is tremendously more enlightening, both mentally and physically. In my current dayjob redesign, I mindfully wrote markup for our HTML mockups, making sure to gracefully degrade and appropriately use tags on each page. Quick Step was very mindfully done; since I was only doing a page a week, I paid close attention to every panel’s composition. Every line was questioned (do I need it?). Does I need this word here at all? Can I have his expression change instead? It was very mindful storytelling.

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