New Year Resolution: Mindfulness in Work 2022

By Zainab Cheema 

New Year Goals

Reflecting over the past year, my New Year’s Resolution for 2022 is to forge a new work-life balance. In the past, the reason that so many past New Years’ Resolutions pancaked is that I created them around productivity—doing, producing, and creating more. For this year, my goal is to work smart. To take time out. To find individual, interpersonal and structural ways of self-care in order to be the best for my family and profession. In this post, I’m going to curate some of the best mindfulness in work strategies that I plan to use in 2022.

As experts have discussed, COVID-era work has proven to be challenging precisely because the boundaries between the personal and the professional have become blurred. Institutions and individuals are finding themselves under incredible stress due to the economic, political and health-based challenges of the COVID world. In 2019, the WHO placed “burnout” on its list of diseases and is currently working with organizations to help them deal with the phenomenon, given its tricky status. Educators and other professionals are all too familiar with this syndrome—it’s one of the driving factors of the Great Resignation.

While knowledge-based, social and technological skills have been traditionally emphasized in the workplace, mindfulness must now be regarded as a core skill that educators and other professionals must actively cultivate. True, the pursuit of mindfulness is now fueling a 4.5 trillion dollar wellness industry. In the current day, it shouldn’t be regarded as an opt-in but a necessity. As James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, observes, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” We have to find ways to foster mindfulness in the lattice our individual and institutional systems.

3 Mindfulness at Work Strategies

One problem is the norm of hyper-responsiveness in our professional communications. Research shows that workers are checking email every 6 minutes and are logged into IM and Slack almost the whole day. Part of the burnout syndrome is always having to be “on” in ways that become exhausting and counter-productive. As a solution, Steve Glaveski recommends asynchronous communication for non-urgent questions, tasks, and projects. Shifting communications from email to a task board changes the way we perceive and relate to it. “Whether it’s a task board from Trello, Asana, Monday, or Basecamp, boards permit users to leave comments and ask questions in a way that promotes asynchronous responses instead of the real-time pull of email and instant messaging.” It goes without saying that individuals and organizations must accompany the shift with training on new norms and expectations for asynchronous communication. For my group projects this year, I plan to use Google Docs to organize asynch modes of working and communicating. 

Mindfulness can be brought into our work, as well as our leisure and personal time. Strategically using your calendar to block off chunks of time—or even an entire day—could a good strategy to rechannel attention away from the cloud of emails and micro-tasks towards meaningful creativity. Jan Ascher and Fleur Tonies recommend blocking off anywhere from one to three hours a day for deep work. Cal Newport coined the phrase in his 2016 bestselling work, Deep Work; Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. He defines deep work as “professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.” It’s in deep work—or the zone or flow state, as it’s also called—where real value is created. Working smart to optimize deep work should be a key priority for 2022.

While these are useful strategies, the core of mindfulness-based approaches involves storytelling—assessing and changing the story that we tell ourselves about work. Work is a core part of our identities. However, if you have noticed a pattern of letting workplace tasks and emails cross healthy boundaries, it’s probably useful to examine the hidden fears and distorted perceptions that may be driving our behaviors. Kate Northrup discusses the scenario of continuing to send out emails at 6 pm, after we have promised to “log-off” for dinner and bedtime. “Take five minutes or so to write out the story you’re telling yourself, and then dig deeper. If the story is that if you don’t send out those last few emails, you’ll be behind tomorrow, ask yourself: Then what? Perhaps the answer is that then you’ll feel rushed to get your proposal in by the end of the week. Ask yourself again:Then what? Keep digging until you get to the core story.” Questioning these beliefs and perceptions will help you to take control of your story and change it.

In times of stress and change, mindfulness can help us shift the locus of control from events and circumstances to ourselves. Working smart in 2022 just might allow us—at least, I hope!—to unlock the unexpected and mine new talents, capabilities, and self-knowledge.