"The point, however, is that as a consequence of noticing when our mind has wandered and then replacing our attention on the breath 10,00 or 100,000 times, we are subtly strengthening our awareness of what is happening in our mind and, so, our ability to take control of where we focus our concentration."
So true. But mindfulness doesn't need to be obtained/focused solely by focusing on your breath. I think you can gain a lot of mindfulness strength by training yourself how to (actually) focus on your work: http://focusr.co
This is especially useful because it prevents downward spirals from happening before they begin. For example, if you want to work on X, you can write "Do X" in this extension. Then, when you open a new tab to do something non-productive (like browsing reddit, etc), you'll see a huge reminder of "Do X" to prevent goofing off before it even happens.
Employers have more information about salaries than employees. This information asymmetry can be problematic for employees who aren't savy enough (or have the time enough..) to find out what a fair-market salary is for their position. I'm NOT suggesting this is a legislation-level problem, but just pointing out a frustration that has been voiced by many of my developer friends (in NYC in particular).
Instead of focusing on your (i.e.) your breath, you can practice bringing your focus back to your current task. Whenever you open a new tab, it shows your current task in huge letters to prevent you from going on a downward spiral (coughhackernewscough :) before it starts.
Mindfulness for your work: http://focusr.co/ (i.e., instead of being mindful to your breath or some aspect of your environment, you can practice mindfulness by bringing your attention back to your current task).
I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. That is partially why I created this webapp: http://focusr.co/. It helps you focus on one thing at a time, which can be hard enough for people even w/o this diagnosis.
A tool to help combat distractions like Twitter* and focus on one thing at a time: http://focusr.co.
*Although I'm pleased with Twitter's self-awareness here, and I'm not saying there's anything intrinsically wrong with services like these. You just aren't going to see many successful entrepreneurs wasting their time on these services (unless they're directly responsible for engaging users through it).
Shallows is a great book about this and "what the internet does to our brains". This chrome extension is supposed to combat the internet's unquestionable ability to mess with our work focus: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/focusr/fgdcnfgmneb...
There seems to be a booming market for Slack integrations lately. This is great because Slack just = text, and so building prototypes can be fairly easy. Our product (http://focusr.co) actually started purely as a Slack integration, and evolved into something else.
Haha, yes. There's this great book called "The Shallows" that talks about how originally people thought the web would increase our depth of learning with deep links to any concept that we didn't grok. But what ended up happening is that people can't stay on one piece for more than a few seconds. People can't focus on anything without having some new distraction pop up and tearing them away. It doesn't have to be that way though. Anybody who does demanding office work should be interested in combating distractions.
"Does anybody else have this problem? How do you deal with it?"
Yes -- it's human nature. All you can do is focus on one thing at a time. If you are focused on what's important, then you are allowed to not feel guilty. A great man once said "take so much action your conscious brain doesn't have time to fall into its default patterns of worrying".
For help on focusing on one thing at a time, and taking so much action you don't have time to feel bad: http://focusr.co
From the article: "When I look at more senior developers I notice...[they] take multiple short breaks throughout the day and between those breaks they tend to be very focused on the tasks they have to complete. They don’t have their Slack open all the time and they work on a single thing at a time. And they are consistent about that."
For help focusing on a single thing at a time, check out http://focusr.co
So true. But mindfulness doesn't need to be obtained/focused solely by focusing on your breath. I think you can gain a lot of mindfulness strength by training yourself how to (actually) focus on your work: http://focusr.co