Stressed, clients permanently on your case and a to-do list as long as the M1? It can happen to all of us, but it’s all too easy to get to the point where you literally do not know which task to do next, as each and every one is screaming “I’m a critical important task….Do me first!”

Now there are of course a number of excellent ways to manage your time, as is being discussed by Mark Kirby in his excellent ‘Managing Your Time’ series within Freelance Advisor, and I’d wholeheartedly advocate going down that route but if you mind is whirring at all times of the day and night, how about giving it a holiday?

Am I talking real holiday, which would be nice, or something else? Imagine if you can for a second, that peaceful part of any holiday, almost after a week when your brain has finally started to slow down and realised that those ‘to-do’s’ that keep popping up really can wait till you get back? Starting to remember that blissful feeling?

Well what if I told you that you could experience something possibly even better if you put a little time and effort into it? I’ll get straight to the point: Meditation. Scared and ready to click away? Don’t be. It’s taken me quite a few years to realise the benefits of meditation until I was dragged kicking and screaming down to a meditation class by a mate of mine. One hour later though, after a few hints, tips and techniques and boy, I felt exactly like I’d been on a two week holiday…except I hadn’t left London and in total it had taken one and a half hours!

Meditation Evening Classes

Now, do I detect a reluctance to go to an evening class with some strange people? Well if you did make the effort to go along to an evening class you’d almost certainly find it to be welcoming, friendly and full of people exactly like you. The other key thing to point out is that there are so many courses out there that are non-religious and cite themselves as ‘non-denominational’. If anything fractionally religious makes you run a mile make sure you double check.

Meditation Podcasts

Is there any other way of getting a taster of this ‘holiday for the mind’ thing? Absolutely! It was really on a whim that I decided to search iTunes to see if there were any meditation podcasts and I found ‘The Meditation Podcast.com’. I downloaded the very first episode that very evening and tried it out. With a little bit of focus I listened to the careful guidance of Jesse and Jean Stern and 26 minutes later, once the meditation exercise had finished, I felt great. My overly active ‘chattering’ mind was for the first time in years calm. Not only did I sleep well that night but tasks the following day’s tasks were done methodically, focused on and each one finished before I moved to the next. How did I achieve this? Simple. My mind wasn’t continually fretting about the other 16+ important tasks of the day and making me lose concentration.

Go to www.themeditationpodcast.com or iTunes and download the first or all of the series for free, find yourself a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed (turn off that mobile) and treat yourself.

photo credit: gotplaid?