Flow, and the other states

What do I need to prepare for flow?

Before I want to get into the flow state, I need to:

• Break down the task at hand to action points.
• Write down all pending thoughts, get them out of my head and onto paper.
• Double-check that no one will break my focus right away (message platforms).
• Turn my phone around, setting into "Do not disturb" mode.

What keeps me out of flow?

"Not enough time to work on it"

• How do I solve this and convince myself to get something done?
• Should I keep a backlog of "small tasks"?
• Plan/block my day better. What is breaking in my plans? Note these down during shutdown.

How does one stay in flow?

During a busy workday at companies that have a startup mindset one can easily get distracted by coworkers coming in to check up on features, timelines, discuss a solution or just coming by to say hi.

All of those reasons are important, but if you are in the middle of debugging a large feature and someone comes by or sends a message to asks who to ask about another feature, it will break your flow. How could you make yourself a little less available, so people won't break your flow?

Add some friction:

• Wear noise cancelling headphones
• Put "do not disturb" on message apps

Or if you can

• Sit at home office

Areas

• Focus
• Auto-pilot
• Aware
• Distracted (Free of Mind)

Quadrants

Flow

• Where time travel happens, where stuff gets done

Mindful

• Where hard research and new things are learned

Creative

• Where you freely explore new ideas

Mindless

• Where your brain relaxes, zooms out and see the connections of it all.

Thoughts

I believe that it is "cheapest" to allways go through Mindless when you are swapping between quadrants.