10% Happier

Just finished Dan Harris's 10% Happier book, which I read on Oyster Books (a great service that acts like a Netflix for books). I loved it. Here are some quotes:

On Multitasking:

...when you're moving from this project to this project, your mind flits back to the original project, and it can't pick it up where it left off. So it has to take a few steps back and then ramp up again, and that's where the productivity loss is. This problem was, of course, exacerbated in the age of what had been dubbed the "info-blitzkrieg," where it took superhuman strength to ignore the siren call of the latest tweet, or the blinking red light on the BlackBerry. Scientists had even come up with a term for this condition: "continuous partial attention."



A question to ask yourself:

Is this useful?
It's okay to worry, plot, and plan...but only until it's not useful anymore.


On mindfulness:


Picture the mind like a waterfall...the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions; mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall.