Daniel M. Ingram:
I definitely found that my meditation training enabled me to stay concentrated on tasks for much longer, to find them less onerous, to be more aware of needless associated things that made them harder (such as unnecessary bodily tension associated with them, holding my breath during them or breathing in some less than optimal way during them, with thoughts about those tasks that just didn't make any sense at all but which before I hardly noticed clearly, etc.).
There were some periods that were exceptions to these, brief cycles through various Dark Night phases, but overall the grand trajectory was one of clear improvement.
That said, I am always wary of advertising meditation in this way, fearing the corporate world will use meditation to produce nice, docile, industrious Capitalist Worker Bees, not that I have a problem with the nice part, or the docile part necessarily, or the industrious part, nor getting things done, but something in that combination clearly has something creepy about it, just sayin'.
As for becoming a docile work bee, not sure how much of a danger that is. There are plenty of enlightened types with huge personalities who are apparenty very much walking their own path. Perhaps the docile ones already had that tendency to start with. For myself, I did not have that tendency and still don't. Although there is something in me that changed that might look a bit like being docile. It's more that now I am less likely to do useless fighting, histrionics, arguing, etc. because I often see no point in it. I will more quicklty decide either to do it or to say no. I am less likely to agree to something and then be resentful too, instead I am more likely to just say no to start with. So although I sling a lot less drama than before, I am not what I would call more docile.
Kinda reminds me of a used car salesmen I once knew (he was no longer a car salesmen by that time). He said that hardest people to deal with (on average) in his experience when selling a car were people from India. He said it was because they would diligently and very politely and repeatedly just keep saying 'no' in various ways over and over no matter what he said so that they were very hard to bargain with. Once they decided something, they would just very politely and even temperedly not budge no matter what. And so they would tend to get better deals on cars. ;-P (caveat, I have no idea how true that holds across cultures and locations and peoples' experiences, I don't even know many from India, but I took it as a lesson on how one might handle oneself in such situations.)
-Eva