- Feb 5, 2002
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(OSV News) — Nearly 15 years after spending a summer at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut living alongside its Benedictine nuns, Jane Sloan Peters still recalls the tinge of frustration she would feel when the bells tolled, signaling the need to set aside work and head to prayer.
“I’m the kind of person that wants to just complete something before I move on to something else. And we couldn’t, you know. We had to stop weeding the hill halfway through and go up” for prayer, she said. “And then, you know, maybe you could go back to the task, or maybe it would be time for something else.”
While monks and nuns may interrupt their work to keep the prayer hours of their day, stopping a task at a predetermined time is a common mainstream productivity practice.
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, a strategy expert and business consultant in Amsterdam, uses the method himself.
“You stop when the bell rings, and preferably that’s right in the middle of something, because when you stop right in the middle of something, it’s much easier to start again,” he told OSV News. “It’s kind of a time management aspect of the monastery life that makes you very productive.”
Continued below.
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“I’m the kind of person that wants to just complete something before I move on to something else. And we couldn’t, you know. We had to stop weeding the hill halfway through and go up” for prayer, she said. “And then, you know, maybe you could go back to the task, or maybe it would be time for something else.”
While monks and nuns may interrupt their work to keep the prayer hours of their day, stopping a task at a predetermined time is a common mainstream productivity practice.
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, a strategy expert and business consultant in Amsterdam, uses the method himself.
“You stop when the bell rings, and preferably that’s right in the middle of something, because when you stop right in the middle of something, it’s much easier to start again,” he told OSV News. “It’s kind of a time management aspect of the monastery life that makes you very productive.”
A desired lifestyle
Continued below.
Aiming to live and work better in 2024? Look to monks
In the world of time management, monasticism has been touted as a source of tools for achieving a desired lifestyle. Headlines in Forbes, Fast Company, Business Insider and elsewhere in 2023 highlighted the productivity hack of going "monk mode" -- a period (hours to weeks) of deeply focused...
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