Zen at Work

I follow a Zen blog, and today's posting was about having Zen at work.  Now that might sound like a crazy idea - or put the notion in your head that we just sit down crosslegged on the floor, our wrists on our knees, finger and thumb touching and chanting some strange "ooohhhmmmm".  Totally not the case! (Unless of course you feel a huge need for that -- I recommend that during lunch.  maybe in your car even! hehehe) 

The one key point was this:

At work, we often face stressful situations, dreaded projects, irritating co-workers, frustrating bosses, an overwhelming number of tasks and messages, boring work we don’t enjoy.
These problems have one simple cause: we’re holding on.

 Of course we are.  It's very hard to let go of the minor irritations that really get our goat!  When you let go of these ideas of how things should be, how other people should behave to make you happy, how you can do everything at once … then the problems go away.  They simply don’t exist.

One of the things I've done most of my life is follow a simple rule when there's an overwhelming amount of tasks to be done (and let's face it -- in today's work place, that's an every day occurrence!)  My suggestion is if you pick it up, you deal with it - fully, all the way through.  If you pick up a piece of paper, don't set it down in some other place  because you'll "do it later".  You'll be worrying in the back of your mind about when you'll have time to get to the 'later' stuff!  Pick it up and deal with it.  If it needs to be filed, file it.  Same with sorting out your closet -- and let's face it, girls, its something that we put off all the time!!  Pick up one item and decide - keep it? donate it?  toss it?  The point here is to deal with every little item that needs to be dealt with.  Cleaning off the top of your desk?    Pick up all the pens and put them back in their place.  Toss out all the empty soda cans and water bottles.  Don't just keep moving them from place to place! 

Find your Zen for work, and make work a less stressful place; let those other things fade away, and live in what’s actually happening, right now.

PS:  I'm chuckling - when I looked at images for 'zen', I found pictures of rocks piled up like this one.  And I've always done that when I'm out in the yard, out for a walk, I pause, pick up a rock or two and pile them up.  Had no idea it was my own kind of "zen"!!!  ~grin~