This week, I’m meditating for 35 hours as a productivity experiment

by | Jul 22, 2013 | Productivity Experiments

Takeaway: I’m meditating for an entire week, and at the end I’m going to share everything I learn about productivity with you.

Estimated Reading Time: 1 minute, 42s.

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To see the results of this experiment, check out: The top 10 things I learned meditating for 35 hours last week.

Every single day this week I will be meditating all day (for a total of 35 hours), while continuing to life my life, to see exactly how meditation can make you more productive. And at the end of the week I’m going to share everything I learn with you.

Even though I’ll be spending five hours a day meditating, I plan to keep up with email, respond to texts and tweets, stay on top of my workout plan, and maintain social contact with my friends, family, and housemates. I even have a few meetings scheduled throughout the week. After all, if all I do is meditate, it would be pretty difficult to measure how my productivity changes. Naturally, though, I’ll have less time to write so there won’t be a lot of posts this week, if any.

Meditation has a ton of benefits, all of which I want to explore first hand throughout the week. It has been proven to help you focus, calm you down, make your brain age slower (and actually increase the amount of grey matter in your brain), help your mind defragment its thoughts, and it’s even been shown that if you meditate you need less sleep!1

At the end of the week I’m going to write about everything I learn, and give you practical, tactical tips on how to use meditation to become more productive.

Since I’m dedicating a full year to devour everything I can about productivity, one of the best parts about A Year of Productivity is how I can take my experiments to the extreme. I can spend 10 days in total reclusion, without any social interactions or sunlight. I can reduce my body fat from 17% to 10% and gain 10 pounds of lean muscle mass in the process.2 And I can meditate for a week straight.

For the last several years I’ve had a daily, 30-minute meditation ritual which I largely credit with keeping me sane and focused. I can’t wait to see what happens this week when I crank it up a notch.

Well, several.


  1. Source: https://chrisbailey.com/meditation-guide/ 

  2. A feature article on this experiment is coming next week. Here’s a schedule of all the cool stuff I have planned. 

Written by Chris Bailey

Chris Bailey has written hundreds of articles on the subject of productivity and is the author of three books: How to Calm Your Mind, Hyperfocus, and The Productivity Project. His books have been published in more than 40 languages. Chris writes about productivity on this site and speaks to organizations around the globe on how they can become more productive without hating the process.

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