Mindfulness Activity

What I decided to do as a mindfulness activity was to actually sit down in a quiet room and read a couple chapters from my Marketing textbook. I usually have a very hard time reading from textbooks. I usually don’t retain any information because I don’t understand what I’m reading for the most part. Also, it takes me a long time just to finish a chapter so I try to just skim through it. It takes me about forty-five minutes or so to fully skim through the chapter versus over an hour to fully read a chapter.

Before I began reading, I made sure that my laptop was off and put away, as well as my cell phone. Those two items are the top reasons why I get distracted when I’m trying to be productive. After making sure there was no one or nothing around that could possibly distract me, I began to read. I came into this activity with a mindset that this topic was interesting to me and that I could really learn something if I tried to understand what I was reading and relate it to real life activities. I also took notes on sticky notes as I was reading to highlight what I found most important on each page and what my professor elaborated on during class lectures. Before I knew it, I was able to finish two chapters in less than two hours, which is a pretty decent time for me.

The results I received from this mindfulness activity were quite surprising to me. Not only was I able to finish two chapters in less than two hours, but I also understood a majority of the concepts I was reading. I was actually able to retain quite a bit of information from the textbook and looking back at the sticky notes I made was also helpful in refreshing my memory. I also found that I actually enjoyed reading the textbook for once. I didn’t feel like it was a waste of time because I actually got something out of it, versus before when I would spend hours trying to read a chapter and in the end not even understand anything I read. Because I did mindfully read through these chapters in my...