Flow State, according to wikipedia, is defined as the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. It is considered the ideal positive psychological state.
Recently I found myself being in this state regularly, and it brought me a lot of peace and joy. This made me think, what are the factors that led me to this flow state?
Reason #1: Time is spent on things I enjoy
This is the surface level reason. Lately I’m spending a lot of time coding the MVP of our startup product, and every day I implement some new features, fix some bugs, or make things more sustainable. Day by day, I can first hand observe how things are improving and coming together. Progress being visible is an amazing state to be in.
But this reason alone doesn’t fully explain my flow state. In the past I’ve also worked on things I enjoy, but I haven’t felt this flow state so frequently. So what’s different this time?
Reason #2: I have uninterrupted time
Then I realized another key difference this time. I have uninterrupted time. Each day, I can spend several hours without interruption in coding. This is a luxury I haven’t had in years.
In my last few big tech jobs, my days were broken into 30-min slots, and I was just running from meeting to meeting. Each 30-min went like: context switch in, discussions, then context switch out. This pattern repeated from arrival in office to leaving for home. This is common for many people; that’s part of the job responsibility for anyone with leadership roles.
This is why many companies implement no-meeting-day or no-meeting-week. However, a running joke was, even though we call it “no meeting day”, in reality it became “other meetings day”. This is because all regular-cadence-meetings were canceled on a “no meeting day”, then it’s easier to schedule other one-off meetings on such days. Very quickly, calendar gets filled on “no meeting days”, and uninterrupted time is still non-existent.
Okay, I can explain why I didn’t have uninterrupted time at big tech, but it’s still interesting that in my last startup Leap.ai, even though I had uninterrupted time, I didn’t experience flow state this much.
So what’s unique this time?
Reason #3: I have rhythm
Then I realized another thing I have now but not before. My daily schedule now is extremely predictable.
At the moment, here’s my typical day:
Morning
Get up and walk dog
Get daughter ready for school, drop her off, and then drive to the co-work space
Get a cup of coffee and some snacks, and quickly think through what I need to do for the day
Have 15-min 1:1s with every engineer
Sync with my co-founder on any company related topics (could be product, marketing, funding, hiring, etc). On Tue / Thu, this sync happens during our gym workout session.
Have lunch, and drive home afterwards
Afternoon
Coding session #1
Daily eng team sync
Pick up daughter from school
Coding session #2
Walk dog
Dinner & evening, family time
Sometimes need to do coding work if unfinished during the day
It’s this rhythm that truly enables me to enter flow state often. It provides higher efficiency for the uninterrupted time.
I’m pretty certain once MVP is built, and we enter the public launch stage, this rhythm will be broken. I just remind myself that I need to make extra effort to create a new rhythm which fits that new stage.
My conclusion: Rhythm amplifies uninterrupted time, which gets spent on things I enjoy, and this is why I have a higher chance of entering flow state.
Hope everyone can establish their rhythm.