Yoga helps us to be focused

July 17th, 2006

One of the most revolutionary rewards of information technology is turning into an unpleasant feature of our working lives – too many emails choking our inboxes vying for our attention. I am concerned here only with the messages other than spam.

Like all kinds of problems in our life we have more than a fair share of unanswered emails in our mail boxes. But then are we patient enough to read through and answer the mails we choose to open? My experience says we don’t.

I receive about 60-70 mails a day which are not spam. Atleast 60% of the mails are incomplete responses to my queries addressed to the concerned persons. The responses clearly show that either the senders did not go through my mails from top to bottom, had no patience to write more than they did or simply chose to ignore the queries left unanswered. A majority of responders thus resort to impression reading – going through a few top lines, a couple of them in the middle, and a response is shot.

The breed of impression (read, impatient) readers is growing.

The end result is incomplete responses, which means repetition of unanswered queries in my follow up mails, more time spent unproductively. Sometimes such carelessness leads to blunders. Yet we claim that we are a people in hurry, capable to doing much more than the time allows.

I can recall incidence of incomplete responses or unanswered mails was not the scenario say five years back. Over the period despite the most advanced repertoire of information technology at our disposal we have grown into an impatient and incommunicable lot with terribly decreasing attention spans.

There are hardly any areas of our life which get our undivided and unhurried (read, unharried) attention We jump out of bed in the morning late; we rush through ablutions hurriedly as we are late; breakfast is a pain in the throat as it means gulping down morsels of food as big as we picked them up from our plate, as we are late; and then we turn into devils behind the wheel as rash drivers because we are late.

Let’s face it; we are a generation of workers going out of focus about just everything about our lives.

Recently I was invited to introduce the basics of yoga to a group of busy executives from an IT company. All of them were overworked and just everything they did as part of their job was firefighting. They often left assignments in hand unfinished for one reason or the other resulting into piles of work left incomplete at the end of the weeks.

Responding to mails was one of the most neglected aspects of their chaotic routine.

For all of them the last time they were happy about their jobs was when they received their appointment letters on joining. It’s just hell thereafter, all agreed.

We discussed time management as the first step to make space for yoga in their life. Unless their job demanded they had to get into the habit of going to bed early; by 10 o’clock preferably. They had to be up early too, say at four – six hours of sound sleep are more than enough for an ordinarily healthy individual.

I prescribed them Aalom Vilom (AV), one of the seven breathing exercises under the yoga regime of pranayama. AV is a single-nostril breathing practice. After morning ablutions one has to sit cross-legged, relaxed on a thin mattress spread on the floor. One should preferably choose a quiet place in his house, out on the terrace or a public park. Closing his eyes, he should start with deep inhalations and exhalations five times each, very slowly.

This should be followed by actual AV. One should press one’s right nostril with his thumb and inhale through the left without exerting too much. This is followed by pressing the left nostril with two middle fingers and inhaling through the right. It takes 2-2.5 seconds for a single inhalation or exhalation. It is a good beginning to do AV for five minutes. But those five minutes must be undivided and without break. A very short break for a few seconds to clear up one’s nose, as a beginner would need to, though is fine. The duration could be extended to 10 minutes over a period of few weeks to a month.

For an ordinarily healthy individual 15 minutes of AV is advisable. The practice makes the practitioner focused, helps him plan and develop concentration in his work and day to day routines. He can set priorities clearly, take decisions and work on them without deviating or getting distracted.

The change will be reflected in the mailbox itself.

Entry Filed under: Yoga