This week marked the 6 month anniversary of Mini-Mindfulness. These are 10 minute meditation sessions I do every weekday morning before my work day begins. I’ve been lucky to have a couple co-workers join me the majority of the time (and they sometimes go without me when I have a conflict), and I am so grateful!
Working as a remote worker means a lot of “working alone in your office”, but with a tool like Mini-Mindfulness, I have been able to have a consistent start to my day, which I am confident increases my productivity, while it also improves my mental health!
You don’t need a formal Meditation App (though there are a few solid choices if you are okay with solo sessions). Thinking creatively we turned a mini-golf game into an oasis for starting the day mindfully! Our favorite locations at the moment are Quixote Valley, El Dorado, and 20K Leagues Under the Sea. Give it a try!
Disclaimer: it’s worth noting that in August 2022 the makers of Walkabout Minigolf (Mighty Coconut) introduced a partnership with Lumenkind, also called “Mini-Mindfulness”. We are okay sharing the name with them. 🙂
The crazy thing about this video is that I shot it in the evening with my wife and kiddo (instead of asking my co-workers to take evening time to film with me). My wife used my avatar. My kiddo used a generic avatar (because she didn’t want to “be on camera”). Kind of wild the tools that VR gives us for producing these types of videos. The camera was just me “flying around”.
Total Time in VR: 5 hours and 32 minutes (across 11 VR sessions)
Use Cases: Focus Time (2 hr 3 min), OssoVR Platform (1 hr 10 min), Evening Work (42 min), Team Meetings (40 min), Mini-Mindfulness (30 min), 1:1 Meetings (25 min)
Half way through week two! The header pic today is from our morning “Mini-Mindfulness” session today on the “Gardens of Babylon” course at Walkabout Minigolf. While the focus of this experiment is often on the Horizons Workrooms VR Office, I think it’s important to realize that the virtual campus needs to stretch beyond the walls of the “offices”. For me that’s always been about the mini-golf courses. I started in Cloudlands back in the HTC Vive days, and used Pro Putt (now Golf Plus) before Walkabout launched in the fall of 2020. I used minigolf as a way to connect during lockdown in 2020 and into 2021. I built friendships across all the amazing courses.
Six months ago I decided to offer a morning meditation at work. I looked for a good app for group meditation, but didn’t find any that weren’t solo experiences. That’s when I thought maybe the Walkabout courses could serve a different purpose. A small group of us have been meeting every weekday morning since then, creating a quiet space to prepare for the day. Our mediations are self-guided. We have a ten minute timer and we each do whatever we need to do with those ten minutes. It has become a ritual that I hope keeps going long into our explorations of the metaverse office space. Just another portion of our VR Campus!! (It’s worth pointing out we’ve been using the term “mini-mindfulness” long before Walkabout Minigolf did a partnership with Lumenkind using the same name!)
Cup Half Empty: I had a new issue arise today, which I’m keeping an eye on. A couple time today I needed to reset my desktop passthrough in Workrooms. Each time it was after I took off the headset briefly. When I came back in the passthrough was totally black. When I snapped passthrough button, the passthrough came back but it was shaky and at an odd angle. Turning off passthrough off and on again (I know the IT cliche), it reset and worked properly. Another small glitch, but small glitches with early versions of technology have a tendency to become big barriers if you aren’t careful.
Cup Half Full: I got into the OssoVR build for over an hour today, working on filming video for one of our Partners. There were four of us interacting with some goofing around between takes (i.e. throwing surgical tools at each other). I am a huge believer in the impact surgical VR training can have in the medical field (that’s why I work for OssoVR in the first place), and the biggest impact is when a group is working together. While we had some fun, we got our job done too.
I am rediscovering the power of working alone in VR (focus time in my private VR Office), but the magic and transformative powerof VR is in Collaboration. I got to remember that today, while hiding in a virtual garbage can.
#TLDR
Today was a full rich day of VR. I started in a mindful way, as I do most days, and that set me up for success. I worked on onboarding more team members with Horizon Workrooms, I did some 1:1 work on problems again (so much better than Zoom!), I got to work as a surgical assistant inside the platform of OssoVR, and again I spent a fair amount of my time alone in my VR Office, knocking things off my never ending list.
Carrier Pigeon XR 