Get Everything Done

Psychologists call it the Flow State, athletes call it “The Zone.” Researchers have conducted a number of studies to try to understand this mental state of highly lucid productivity, and they have concluded that if one has three key ingredients, one can consistently put themselves into a Flow State. These key ingredients are:

Goal: You must have a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish.

Balance: You must have a balance between the perceived level of challenge of the Goal vs your perceived ability to meet that challenge. In other words, you must believe you are equal to the challenge that your Goal presents.

Feedback: You must pay attention to how your efforts turn out and immediately correct your course.

As an example, consider runner leaping hurdles on a track. Goal: “Leap over the fast approaching hurdle.” Balance: “I leaped over the previous three didn’t I? I am up to this challenge.” Feedback: “Toe hit the hurdle, I leaped about 2 inches too close, here comes the next hurdle, I’ll try again.” After having repeated this process again and again and again, the runner enters the Flow State, or The Zone.

Most people have difficulty with achieving the Balance portion. To gain the appropriate balance one can either adjust their perceived ability or the perceived challenge of the task. You cannot fool yourself regarding either, it must be a truthful perception. Therefore, the simplest thing to do is to choose a Goal that presents a challenge matching your ability. You’ll recognize this as Mark’s Little and Often principle. So instead of setting your Goal as “write a 60 page paper for my class” set it as “brainstorm on paper topics for 5 min.” Then “expand topic x into a preliminary structure.” Etc.

FV creates in me a Flow State simply by providing me with a repeatable artificial goal of “action my whole preselect list.” I can easily attain the balance I need by preselecting tasks that I feel confident that I can action in the time and context I have presently, and keeping the preselect list shortened to what I believe I can reasonably accomplish now. In addition it helps this balance that I need only action the tasks in the preselect list rather than pressure myself to complete them all. Finally, I get immediate feedback every time I cross off a task. (“Ah, I spent more time on that than I intended, I’ll have to step up the pace on the next two tasks so I have the time I wanted for the third.”)

Combine the Flow State with FV’s tendency to melt down resistance on the root preselect task, and you’ve got a system that puts your work on rails!

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I hadn't realised the extent of the science around this. the phenomenon appears to have been labelled as "transient hypofrontality" - reduced pre-frontal cortex activity, allowing for a different mode of perception and (unconscious) cognition. See for example:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-edge-peak-performance-psychology/201703/the-transient-hypofrontality-edge

http://mattyford.com/blog/2014/9/11/flow-unlocking-better-creativity-and-happiness-part-1

Fascinating stuff. I'm wondering how to make the process more deliberate to get closer to peak performance, by which id do NOT mean quantity of busyness but a wider idea of creativity and good-feeling activity.