[TipVFL]

The title is total clickbait.

From the article: "Then we tracked everyone’s actual performance on the tasks. Here we found that on average, having meditated neither benefited nor detracted from a participant’s quality of work."

They found that people who meditated were more calm and serene, reported less motivation, but performed similarly to people who had done non-meditative activities.

It seems to me that having a calm, relaxed workforce who performs just as well as your normal stressed workers is a pretty big positive. I'd find the study more interesting if it studied the long term effects, like do the two groups tend to diverge in productivity over time? Does it prevent burn out? Increase job satisfaction?

[skywhopper]

Not only that, but the tasks these people were assigned are not good models for work tasks. In a real professional workplace, the tasks are usually related to systems or processes over which the individuals feel ownership. Random tasks about which they know nothing are convenient for a study, but not a good model of actual work.

[darkerside]

Perhaps the meditators were better able to recognize their actual lack of giving a fuck

[antonvs]

That's a really good point. People work hard to try to justify to themselves why they're doing what they're doing, and that's exactly the kind of bs that meditation helps you reconsider and cut through.

[arthurcolle]

No wonder the #1 question on Google Trends is "What am I doing with my life?"

[manicdee]

Spoiler: that has been the number one question asked by sentients since sentience was a thing.

[fnordsensei]

Not only that, but (speaking from personal, anecdotal experience), most of the benefit as it applies to work tasks will be realized over time, for outcomes where consistent and sustained focus and stress management is most beneficial.

That being said, what the mindfulness movement tends to gloss over is the fact that, with enough determination, meditators will occasionally shake loose deep-seated mental gunk, resulting in better quality of life if processed, but sometimes with a tumultuous period while dealing with it. Naturally, performance in other areas of life might drop during such a period.