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FINDING FLOW
If you’re going to become limitless, you’re going to want to get yourself into a flow state as often as possible. So how do you do this? I can offer five ways:
Eliminate Distractions
Earlier, we talked about the importance of keeping distractions to a minimum. If you’re going to find yourself in a flow state, eliminating distractions is absolutely essential. It can take you up to 20 minutes to reconnect with what you’re doing after you’ve been distracted from doing it. How are you ever going to get into the flow if you’re constantly rebooting because a text drew away your attention, or because you just wanted to make a quick check of social media before you got back to work? So, put everything else aside and concentrate completely on what you’re doing.
Give Yourself Enough Time
Make sure you have a block of time set aside to get into flow. It’s commonly believed that, when conditions are right, it takes about 15 minutes to achieve a flow state and that you don’t really hit your peak for closer to 45 minutes. Clearing out only half an hour or so isn’t going to allow you to accomplish much. Plan to set aside at least 90 minutes, and ideally a full two hours.
Do Something You Love
When we think of flow, we tend to think of people achieving at extremely high levels: the athlete perfecting her game, the musician crafting the ideal guitar solo, the writer quickly putting words down on the page as though taking dictation rather than creating. What’s common among all of these people is that they are doing something that matters to them a great deal. They wouldn’t be satisfied with only being moderately competent, as they aren’t performing a task with which they have a casual relationship. They’re doing things they love.
I’ve been talking to people about flow for decades, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone mention being in a flow state about something they were doing only to pass the time. It’s like the difference between driving an old junker and driving a brand-new Aston Martin. Both might get you to the office, but you’re only likely to really get into the driving experience with one of them. If you find certain annoyances in something you’re doing, or if you find it to be dull much of the time, these negatives are going to prevent you from truly getting into the flow.
Have Clear Goals
One of the most efficient flow preventers is a lack of clarity. If you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s likely that casting around for a mission will keep flow at bay. A novelist friend of mine separates the plotting of his novels from the actual writing for precisely this reason. For him, plotting is an arduous task with lots of fits and starts, whereas he takes tremendous pleasure in choosing the right words for his stories and making his characters come alive. By plotting ahead of time, he knows exactly what he’s going to write about on any given day and regularly finds himself disappearing into the flow of his work for hours at a stretch.
So, once you’ve carved out the time, give yourself a clear purpose for how you are going to use that time. If you set yourself on a mission at the outset, and it is something that you’re excited about achieving, you’re likely to find yourself deeply immersed in that mission.
Challenge Yourself . . . A Little
When I talk to people about flow, I consistently hear that they are most likely to achieve flow when they’re doing something that is a little bit of a challenge. In other words, they’re outside of their comfort zone, but not way outside of it. The logic here is clear. If you do something that you can do with both hands tied behind your back, you’re probably going to become bored fairly quickly, and boredom and flow are incompatible.
On the other hand, if you do something that you find extremely difficult, you’re likely to become frustrated, and that frustration is going to keep flow from happening. But if you do something that you love that also has a moderate level of challenge to it—trying to hit a baseball to just one part of the field, trying a new form of tuning on your guitar, or writing from the perspective of a new character, for example—this level of challenge is likely to keep the task exciting for you and therefore engage you deeply.
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