Of keeping your thoughts and focus in the present wherever and whenever you can.

Because worrying too much about the past or about future ‘what-if’ situations can become very unhealthy.

So it pays to be mindful.

You are almost always far better off when you choose to spend more time in the present moment.

Nature often reminds us to be mindful just because of how wonderful it is. I mean, it’s nature. Going for a walk in the forest with the dog, it’s fairly easy once you remember the idea of mindfulness to go ahead and practice it. To breathe in the air, to notice the beauty of nature around you and to observe your dog living in the moment and loving life (dogs are pretty mindful).

But mindfulness can be used in every moment, in every situation. It can be used when you’re washing the dishes and it can be used when you are repairing some tiles behind the clunky old belfast sink in your kitchen, where the tiles have collapsed because the wood underneath them is rotten and now you’ve got a big problem because there is a hole there, it’s a difficult spot to get to but you really have to repair it before the tap falls through it completely (guess who had to do that recently) ;-).

Mindful DIY

Pretty much everything I do these days which could be loosely described as ‘work’ is building or renovation related work.

Recently I’ve been repairing tiles behind the sink, making a shutter, making a ladder holder, repairing a shed where some of the cladding has split, renovating & refitting a kitchen, fixing a leaky gutter, painting some walls, repairing a cast-iron stove which had a hole in it, installing insulation in a roof, making a canopy, dismantling a shed, fixing some decking, making a screen for said decking area, refitting a door, varnishing some stairs… I could go on…

All of these jobs are relatively small things, and all of them have been things I have been doing as part of a bigger project (I have about 5 different building projects on the go at the moment). In fact even most of the things described above can be broken down into smaller jobs, just harder to describe those without being too waffly.

What they (or the even smaller jobs they’re comprised of) all have in common is I have done them all with the same deliberate approach – i.e. mindfully.

This is not nature, it’s building work so what the hell am I on about, doing these jobs mindfully?

I’ll tell you (it is the title of the article after all lol).

1. I take my time – I am in absolutely no rush (all of this work is work I am doing for myself/my family, which helps (i.e. it’s DIY) it is not client work. When it comes to building work, I don’t have any clients or do any client work).
2. I enjoy the process – I learn, I test, I experiment and I have a happy and playful attitude to every task.
3. I am completely in the moment (i.e. Mindful) – I pay attention, I notice every aspect of what needs to be done as well as related things that need to be done

Mindfulness Does Not Mean ‘Slow’

As it’s often associated with breathing, ‘going slowly’ and meditation, it is understandable that mindfulness is often associated with not doing much, with stillness or with ‘slow’.

In my view, though I agree with the idea of ‘going slowly’, I don’t agree with ‘slow’. Let me explain. Going slowly to me means ‘slow down, don’t rush’. It doesn’t mean ‘slow’.

Mindfulness to me simply means being in the moment, but that doesn’t have to mean slow and it doesn’t have to mean doing little. On the contrary, when I pay attention, bring my focus to the moment and really enjoy and ‘get into the zone’ of what I’m doing (which I also believe you can do for anything from small, trivial things such as hammering a nail to more complex things such as playing a round of golf) then I find that I am actually more efficient. Though I am ‘going slowly’ I often end up in a kind of ‘flow’ state – (perhaps muscle memory is built faster whilst more mindful because you are trusting your natural instincts to get on with it and humans are naturally good at being efficient if we get out of our own way).

An added bonus that I find in almost every situation is when I break jobs down to their smaller pieces and do these well, I spot all kinds of things and get all kinds of ideas about related work that I would like to do next. One thing leads very beautifully to the next.

Logically and carefully getting through work is also a form of decluttering (as you are completing one more thing, so one less thing to do) and as we declutter, what is left always becomes clearer.

So if you allow yourself the luxury of giving your full attention to something, giving it all the time it needs (not more, not less) and enjoying the process, I think you will find that you are actually more efficient, you do a better job, you have more motivation to do the work and to do the next thing and you see the next thing much, much more clearly.

So, yep, even doing DIY you can practice mindfulness. In fact you absolutely should.