Transcription
There is a holy grail of productivity, a sweet spot where you can effortlessly tackle even the most challenging tasks while also having fun. It's called flow.
Flow is not a woo-woo mystical concept; it's hard science and has been studied for years, starting with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist who wrote the definitive book on the subject called *Flow*. Flow is a measurable mental state in which your prefrontal cortex, which includes your inner critic, actually shuts down. You experience a loss of self-consciousness, which is another way of saying that you lose your sense of time and place because you're totally immersed in the moment.
You enter a calm, relaxed state of deep concentration in which the actions you're taking feel inherently rewarding. It's also been shown to greatly improve decision-making and performance on a wide variety of skills.
Now, how can we create more flow states in our day-to-day work on purpose? Here are four ways to do it.
First, clear goals. Have you ever been asked to do something by a boss or client, and you sit down and realize you're not even really sure what it means? You have to take some time upfront to clarify for yourself the expectations, the rules, and the guidelines that you're expected to follow. You need to know what the task at hand is, for a lack of clarity on the goal is the ultimate flow killer.
This is also one of the best use cases for digital notes. Take a few minutes at the start of a work session to write down your tasks for the day and, crucially, what the goal of each task is. Why are you doing it? What's the intended result? How will you know if you've succeeded? What does success look like? If you skip that step, you'll get to-dos that roll over from one week to the next endlessly. It's not that you don't have the time to do them; it's that you don't even know what it looks like to do them.
The second requirement for getting into flow is immediate feedback. Usually, when we think of feedback, we think of getting feedback from some external source—friends, colleagues, your boss, or people on social media. That's really not what I mean by immediate feedback. In fact, if you show your ideas and your work too early to someone else, that is more likely to interrupt the state of flow and make you begin to doubt and question yourself.
What I mean by immediate feedback is that you need a way to have your thinking and your ideas make a tangible impact on something that you can see outside of your mind. This is why it's so important that we get our thinking out of our heads and into some kind of physical or at least visual medium.
This is another area where digital notes can be so powerful. What I like to do is lay out my thinking, the steps I'm taking, the points I'm trying to make, and the guidelines I'm trying to follow in an outline format in a digital note. I could keep much of it, or even most of it, inside my head, but by making it tangible and then checking off those items one at a time as I make progress, I can give my brain that immediate feedback that yes, we're making progress, yes, we're moving forward.
There's another side benefit to this, which is if I get interrupted and have to turn away, I can come back and pick up right where I left off. Flow is really about having this loop between yourself and the outer world, where you're constantly going back and forth between the two of them. Something that happens in your brain has an impact on the outside world, and then something in the outside world has an impact on your brain. It's that kind of loop that you want to create to get into flow.
Third, balance between challenge and skill. Research shows that if a task is too easy, it's actually hard for us to give it our full attention. The same thing happens when it's too hard; we just want to give up. There's an art to taking on tasks and projects that are slightly challenging but manageable. They give us enough risk and uncertainty to focus our attention, but not so much fear and stress that it destroys it.
This is again where your second brain can be so useful as a place to break down larger goals and projects into smaller pieces that you can take on one at a time. If you have a new idea for an endeavor you want to take on, don't put that directly onto your to-do list for tomorrow. It needs some time and some thought to prepare it first. Define clearly the intended goal, break it down into stages, estimate more or less how much time those stages are going to take, and evaluate whether you have the right skills or resources. In other words, analyze and reflect on whether this new goal is something that's both worthwhile and feasible.
All that evaluation and reflection is much more effective if you do it externally in writing, such as in your notes.
Fourth, a rich environment. The brain needs a combination of three things to activate its full potential: novelty, unpredictability, and complexity. Novelty stimulates the ancient parts of our brain that are wired to notice that predator stalking us in the grass. Unpredictability creates curiosity, provoking us to pay attention to what happens next. Complexity forces our brains to kick into overdrive to understand the information that's coming at us.
This kind of environment is exactly what a second brain gives you: this rich, multi-sensory visual dashboard of all the kinds of information that inspire you, provoke you, and amaze you, all in one central place. If your work involves creativity—and these days, pretty much every job does—then you don't want to make your email inbox, your to-do list, or your messaging app the main environment in which you work. Those are neatly laid out spaces full of boring practical details that are necessary for getting things done but don't bring out the best in you.
Your digital notes app, on the other hand, is the only digital environment that you and you alone control, which means you can put inspiring quotes in there, snapshots of paintings or architecture you love, sketches that you've drawn or that you've seen, and so much more. It is the place you step into when you want to be immersed in novelty, unpredictability, and complexity without getting distracted by the full force and distraction of the internet.
To sum it up, flow is where productivity meets enjoyment. If you found this helpful and you want to create an environment where flow states happen naturally and effortlessly, I recommend building a second brain foundation. It's our self-paced course with everything you need to know to organize your digital life and beat information overwhelm. Check it out at the link below, and don't forget to like, subscribe, and share your thoughts in the comments.