And now, we're just starting to see the next step of this. We're starting to see companies do some work analyzing what happens when they roll out mindfulness at scale. And so at Aetna, the company I profiled in The Times earlier this month, healthcare costs actually went down at the company in the first full year after they rolled it out. All of a sudden, there's this tantalizing promise that maybe it can even affect the bottom line. So that's one reason. I think that we're in a place where we can have much more empirical conversations about this, which I think helps it be less of a woo-woo, New Age thing.

The second thing I think that has helped is that over the last 30 years, mindfulness has become truly a secular pursuit. Yes, it has some relation, some origins, in traditional Eastern practices, but by no means today is what people are teaching and practicing anything like religion. And so I think the secularization, the fact that it's a purely scientific practice almost, has made it much more accessible to big corporations in particular.

The third is, I think mindfulness is being accepted in the workplace today because we need it more than ever, it seems. We are so stressed. We are so bombarded with constant information overload. We are so addicted to our technology that the promise of a technique that allows us to come back to the present moment and stop obsessing about whatever it we just read in our Twitter stream or what we're about to post on our Facebook page has a unique and enduring allure that is totally understandable. I mean, after a totally frenetic workday here at The Times, the opportunity to quiet down is totally lovely.

Pinsker: So if mindfulness is particularly relevant today because it encourages people to be more aware of the way that they're coping with distraction, then how does the idea of mindfulness mesh with the modern burden of constant multitasking?

Gelles: I would actually say that multitasking is a myth. I think we rarely, if ever, can actually do two things at the same time. I think what we're doing is very rapid task-switching, which leads to inherent inefficiencies. Now, is that part of the fabric of the modern workplace? To a certain extent, it is. And I think that's the moment of opportunity. When I focus on actually writing a story, am I capable of focusing my attention just on the act of writing that story rather than checking Facebook every 30 seconds and glancing at Tweetdeck at the same time? It's possible. Of course, my mind is attracted to these constant inputs, these constant stimuli.

But that's the whole game. The whole game is to not necessarily give in to those urges. Now, if the phone rings, am I going to pick it up? Yeah. I'm not advocating for some kind of hermetic lifestyle in an office. But I think the point remains that if we can actually focus on doing one thing at a time, I believe the outcomes and the results have an opportunity to be better than if we were constantly distracted.