The Case For Doing 1-On-1 Meetings With Yourself

Ellyn Shook has an array of meetings booked for next week with just one person: Ellyn Shook. 

The human resources director at the consulting giant Accenture said she usually uses that time to read, but recently she's started practicing mindfulness meditation. 

"If I were to open my iPhone and you were to look at the next week, you'd see blocks of 'Ellyn time,'" Shook told The Huffington Post's Caroline Modaressy-Tehrani last week at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. "That's really my time to think and be creative."

She said she recently downloaded the app Headspace, a subscription-based guided meditation service. Now she spends about 10 minutes of her me-time meetings practicing, which she said she finds crucial in an age of increasing distraction.

Shook said that her iPhone, the computer monitor on her desk and the televisions on which she watches the news all day can make finding focus feel overwhelming. Regular meditation and healthy amounts of sleep essentially work to drain out the toxins -- such as molecules associated with the degeneration  of brain cells -- that build up during waking hours.

"There's a lot of invasion in your brain," Shook said. "But just trying to create the space is really starting to help me." 

It may soon be able to help the people who work under her. Headspace CEO Sean Brecker told HuffPost  in September that the Los Angeles-based company plans to launch an enterprise product this year for companies that want to provide mindfulness training to employees. Such a course may help alleviate the stress -- and the physical and mental detriments that come of it -- caused by overwork.

"I think it's important that people know that it's OK that you can't do it every single day," Shook said. "Even those micro-changes in their behavior can really have big changes on their lives."