[alfredallan1]

Whose productivity?

The individual’s? If my needs are simple, and easily met by working 2 hours a day, what reason do I have to toil 18 hour days? To enrich someone else? My skills and talents are for me to decide what to do with. What right does someone else have to dictate how much I ought to work?

[lopmotr]

I'm thinking of the advice you sometimes hear about meditating so that you'll be better at your job. Maybe it makes you better at your life but not at work.

[alfredallan1]

Yes, and it lets you be better at whatever you want to be better at. It also lets you figure out what you really want to be better at, rather than arbitrarily pegging that down to be one's job. And isn’t one’s work really part of one’s life?

All it does, really, is put people in a more focussed, balanced state of mind, and shut down much of the incessant internal monologue. Someone focussed is generally better at their job than someone distracted.

So as one of the comments mentioned about monks not producing works of art or science - if an artist/scientist really did get into meditation, and if they were innately passionate about their art/science, they would get better at it. But it is presumptous to assume that the average monk wants be do art/science.