Is your mind on track?

Four Words to Help You Keep Your Day on Track

The quick and easy way to overcome procrastination and distractions

While on the way to a new coffee shop a couple of weeks ago, I passed by a Buddhist temple. On their bulletin board was a flyer for an upcoming lecture entitled “Where is your mind?”

I’m reasonably sure the talk will focus on the Buddhist concept of mindfulness and the idea of “non-judgmental awareness of what we are experiencing in the moment.” But it wasn’t so much the event itself that caught my attention, but rather the title.

Where is your mind?

Those four words stuck with me and tickled my brain as I sat at the coffee shop.

“Where is my mind?” I wondered as I absentmindedly picked up my phone to check messages.

“Where is my mind?” I asked this as I finished editing a paragraph and felt the pull of another distracting thought.

Where was my mind?

Was it on the tea and muffin I had in front of me?

Was it on my writing?

Was it on the humor piece I was tinkering with?

Was it firmly in the moment as I worked to construct a framework for a new program I’m putting together?

More often than not, the answer was a definite no.

My mind needed to be firmly anchored on the task at hand to effectively get things done, but it wasn’t. Merely asking myself where my mind was, was the gentlest pull I needed to bring my focus back to what I was doing.

Asking yourself, “where is my mind” is an excellent way to overcome procrastination and distractions

I don’t have to tell you that it’s so easy to get sidetracked by distractions as you go through your day. Whether you distract yourself or you get pulled in a different direction by someone else, it happens with alarming regularity.

Each time it happens, it’s like you’ve left a speedy freeway where you know exactly where you’re headed and gotten on a much slower off-ramp taking you somewhere you hadn’t planned on going.

You were making significant progress, and then you got sidetracked.