Finding Focus and Flow
This week’s blog post covers focus and flow. Whilst focus, flow and productivity aren’t mindset concepts on their own, I believe both benefit from a good mindset and are essential to allowing yourself to get into a good mindset.
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And especially when it comes to flow and getting into that flow state, I believe mindset and flow to be essential companions to each other and that we could all use a little bit more flow in our lives.
So what is flow. Well you’ve likely experienced it before. It’s the state you get into when you’re more productive, you’re more creative and the magic happens. A lot of people experience this in the gym or in extreme sports. I certainly know that when I’m snowboarding, some days just flow and I’m effortlessly gliding down the mountain, having a lot of fun.
You’ll get it when you’re working, you’re in that state of flow. The words are just coming out. You’re concentrated, you’re inspired. You’re creative and having fun. Time almost ceases to exist.
And when we experience it, we go, wow, that was really cool. And we think that it happened by accident or that we can’t control it. And this just isn’t true. It is something that we can cultivate in our own lives. And it comes as a macro level and a micro level. So the micro level is what most people are familiar with. Moment to moment dropping into and out of that flow state. And the macro level, that’s really about being able to build up the flow state to last weeks, months or even years. It’s a life built with flow and ease. And to get there it’s all about stretching that flow state when your in it. You can stretch it out to last days or even weeks at a time. And that’s when you really become productive.
And cultivating this in your life is a process. And it’s always in progress. We’re always getting better and I love this quote by Peter Drucker, the godfather of business.
Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.
And this is so great. I know for myself personally I’ve often gotten caught up with being super efficient. I’ve built a suite of tools and processes to be super efficient. But what I failed to ask myself, and what you need to be always asking yourself is. Am I being effective. Because I was doing all these things and doing them efficiently and never took the time to zoom out and understand what the right thing was.
What we want to value is effectivness. That’s where it’s all at. Efficiency is this cool little thing you can do but I’d rather be half as efficient and twice as effective since we’re results oriented.
And I do this with all my clients when I coach them. We set theirr vision, their goals and deliverables and from there we set their priority.
And here’s what’s really interesting when we look at language. It’s only been in the last hundred years that the word priority took on the ability to be plural and we start talking about priorities. That’s a new thing. There should only be one priority and when we talk about priority, we talk about one priority at a time.
What’s your priority today? What’s your priority this week? What your priority this month, this 90 days. What’s your priority this year. You get it.
And when you think about your priority (single) this allows you to be hyper focused. And what I find is that when I have one priority for the day and I knock out that priority instead of a list of ‘to dos’ I actually get more done. And a lot of things that I thought I needed to do got covered when I took care of that one priority. And it’s a great win. Especially if you take care of it before noon since it’s the first thing I do when I start my work day.
And this is where you see it all linking up with your goals since we created that 10 year vision and reverse engineered it down to 3 years, down to a year, down to 90 days so we’re thinking about our strategy. And now we’ve got the strategy we’re thinking in even smaller terms now. And when we have that priority, then we can think about efficiency / productivity.
Before then though you’ve got your priority for the week and then you can have on Monday, what’s my priority. Then Tuesday, what’s my priority. And so on.
This builds back up to our big picture strategy. And i love the question from the book the one thing:
What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary.
And I’ve got this exact image drawn out on the wall in my office.
And this is where we start the planning process. And what I want you to do is the following.
I’d like you to spend a whole day every quarter planning out the priority for the next 3 months.
And then set aside 3 hours every month to set out the priority for that month
And then take 1 hour every week setting out the priorities for that week. And I say priorties (plural) here since it’s a priority for Monday. A priority for Tuesday. etc AND also set out a priority for the whole week.
And what you may find is that when you finish that priority on lets say Tuesday, the Wednesday priority shifts because something happened. And that’s cool. This is going to happen so anticipate this and be ready to shift and flow with it.
And then finally, have an accountabilibuddy. Either your coach or a business partner or a friend. Someone you are communicating with what your priority is and they are able to steer you back on course.
A great place for this is in the free Agoge Project Facebook group where we keep each other accountable and list our priority for the week every week.
I tend to do the weekly hour on Monday mornings. Some people like doing it on Sundays.
So we’ve had a look at what it takes to be effective by zooming out and identifiying those priorities. So the next step is to zoom back in and be productive and focused and ensuring we maintain that state of flow.
Now I’m just going to touch on your weekly calendar and that 1 hour you’ll spend planning the week.
I’d like you to plan in blocks and batches.
And the first thing I want you to plan in your schedule before anything else is your time off. Yes, your time off first and this is super important. This can be a big hurdle for a lot of people.
First I want you to schedule your self care and time off. That is your training, education, hair cuts, pedicures, reading, family time, meditation. All that stuff. That gets planned first.
Next I want you to schedule in you hobbies and adventures. This is still self care and you may notice that we put you first. It’s likely that up until this point you’ve been putting yourself last. So be specific and schdule in your hobbies. For me that’s golf.
And finally, I’d like you to schedule in new experiences. So this is doing something novel. Be a white belt, a beginner. It’s great to experience that nervousness and insecurity from being in a new environment and stretching yourself and trying something new. So that’s your homework. Try something new next week. I recommend a dancing class if you’ve never been dancing.
Then once you’ve scheduled everything for yourself, then I want you to schedule your work. And you really only want the 8 hours of that max a day.
And with your work, I’d like you to do batching. If you have lets say a lot of meetings, it’s really valuable to batch them together. If you have a day with a client meeting at lets say 9am, then 1pm then again at 3pm that’s really going to disrupt your flow. So you want to batch all your meetings together.
Then batch your admin work together. So I personally only do emails once or twice a day.
And then you want to batch single tasks or a group of similar tasks together. And then do that task and nothing else (likely your priority for the day).
And set a timer. This should be the bulk of your day. You sit down and set a timer for lets say 90 minutes and work on that task and nothing else for 90 minutes. Then nomatter where you are, take a break. Maybe 20 minutes. Go for a walk. Brew a coffee. Do something rejuvinating.
And when you’re doing this task, close down everything else. Turn off your notifications. I have my phone in do not disturb mode. Close your email down. This is your focus time and you need to get into the flow.
Keep a journal nearby to jot down any distracting ideas or thoughts you have and then get back to the task at hand.
Next thing to think about and this is equally important in achieving that flow state is your environment.
Who is around you and are they distracting you? Are there any visual distractions? Are the audible distractions? Are you getting disturbed.
Whatever works best for you to give you that space to get into that flow state and work un distracted for 90 minutes at a time.
It’s then also important to sort out those snacks and coffee before you sit down to work and also make sure you do your bathroom break before you start.
Audibly as well, it’s important that you aren’t being disturbed by people talking or listening to music or podcasts or the radio with people talking.
We both know that multi-tasking is a myth and that even comes down to having the radio on in the background. It’s far better to put headphones in and listen to music without any words. I like brain FM. Complete silence is also great. It depends on you. But if you do like noise, try and make it wordless.
And all this is super important as well since not only can’t we multi-task, but it takes time to switch between tasks. It takes the average person about 20 minutes to get into deep focus. So if you are getting distracted then you are switching your brain focus back and forth and this is not only really unproductive but it’s also very taxing on the mind and taxing on the brain. And this is what is stopping most people from hitting that flow state and also causing burnout and fatigue. You’ll actually find that if you get into the flow and get focused work done, you’ll feel more energised and be more productive and this is why you’ll have time to focus on your self care.
When was the last time you had 30 minutes of un-interrupted deep focused work?
If you can keep stacking the deep focus work you’ll see how you can start to just stay in that flow continously.
Ok, so finally we’re going to dive a bit deeper into energy.
So if you consider three pillars.
Time, energy and attention.
As you know, time is mostly fixed. I say mostly fixed because although we don’t have full control over time in that we can’t turn the clock back, I know that I personally have more energy in the morning so time in the morning is more precious than time in the evening for me. I know for some of you that’ll be the opposite so it’s important to take note of your energy levels during the day.
Your energy is variable and also predictable. It’ll flow up and down depending on the time of day, what you’ve eaten, coffee and other supplements, and you can track all this. You’ll also find some tasks are more energy draining than others.
And that’s why attention is so important and this is trainable. It’s a practice and something we can cultivate over time. I use tools like meditation, journaling and breath work to train my attention.
And it’s important because as we spoke about if you are continuously letting your attention drift then you are also leaking energy. And if you find that you’re attention is taxed, maybe you’re exhausted and can’t focus then you know you need to replenish your energy and take a break. And have something that rejuvinates you. This could be a nap, or a walk or reading.
And what I’d like you to work on is that when you notice you’re getting to that point where your attention is drifting and you need a break. Try and stretch yourself just by 10%. Go a bit further. And then take that break. This way you are training your nervous system like you train your physical body to focus more tightly on a single point.
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This article was written by Stuart Munnich. If you’d like to know more or receive notifications for future articles, please head over to the Agoge Project Website or subscribe to updates right here!
