The cost of interrupted work (2023)

Some days an interruption will throw me off my train of thought, and I spend the remaining six hours collecting discarded bottles and railway ties for hopeful use somewhere, somehow, sometime.

Other days an interruption costs me pretty much nothing.

I’m still trying to figure out how to tell which of those days I’m going to have and whether to just not log into Slack for the day.

I find a bit of meditation before work and good coffee reliably put me in the latter state, maybe 19 times out of 20.

Any advice on getting started with meditation? Particularly for someone with a busy mind.

I'm not studied in any particular tradition. I typically take a few minutes to connect with exactly what my body is feeling. The socks on my feet, the cinch of a belt, the wind blowing my hair, the cool or hot of HVAC on my palms and knuckles, the minor ache or pain, and so on.

I typically start from my feet and go to top of my head, then back down to my nose. It typically takes me about 10 minutes.

Then, I ponder what I remember of my coffee, breakfast, dinner the night before, how I felt when I woke up. Then I imagine how I want to change things. I do this 2-5 minutes.

At that point, I plan my day.

It works for me. I know there are a ton of different ways to do it, but for me it's simply a time for reconnecting to my internal and external self. Because its the same format with new content (what I feel now, what happened most recently) it feels more like a common exercise routine than a hard thing. But it took a few weeks of frustrating effort to learn to keep focus.