Flow isn’t a hack

Most of what gets sold about flow is about squeezing more out of yourself. A morning routine, a supplement, a playlist, a timer on your desk. I get the appeal. I spent years running companies, so I’ve tried most of it.

Flow is the state where you’re absorbed in what you’re doing. An hour goes by and you haven’t looked at your phone. You’re in a conversation and you’re not rehearsing what to say next, you’re just in it. Most people know it from somewhere: work, sport, music, cooking, a long run.

What I’ve found is that you can’t grab it. The harder you push for it, the further away it tends to get. When you’re gripping a task and trying to force focus, your jaw gets tight, your breathing goes shallow and high, and you keep reaching for your phone without ever deciding to. That’s a body under pressure. A body under pressure is looking out for the next problem, not settling into the work in front of it.

Why I don’t call it a hack

I’m a Zero to Dangerous alumnus with the Flow Research Collective, and I’ve practised breathwork since 2017. I still don’t think of flow as something you can hack. A hack is a trick to get round something. Flow is more like a side effect. It turns up when a few ordinary things are in place: your attention isn’t split five ways, your body’s settled enough that it isn’t on alert, and the task is hard enough to hold you but not so hard that you freeze.

You can’t switch it on. You can set things up so it’s more likely. Most of that is boring.

Setting it up instead of chasing it

The biggest one is the phone. If it’s on the desk, some of your attention is on it, even face down. For the block of work that matters, put it in another room.

Then look at how you start. A lot of people go straight from email into the hard thing, still wound up from the last message. A minute or two of settling first tends to help more than another coffee.

And keep it small and regular. It’s the same reason I keep coming back to daily practice over big pushes, which I wrote about in January in skip the resolution, keep a practice. Focus works the same way. A few minutes done most days does more than one heroic weekend.

Before your next hard task

Pick one block of work today that you actually care about. Put your phone in another room. Sit back in your chair with both feet on the floor. Breathe out slowly through your mouth, as if through a straw, ten times. If you feel spaced out or dizzy, stop and breathe normally. Then write down the one thing you’re going to do in the next half hour, and start.

Notice the first moment you want to leave the task. To check something, get a drink, open a new tab. You don’t have to stop yourself. Just notice it, and see what was happening right before. Was it a hard bit? A dull bit? A bit where you weren’t sure what came next? That moment tells you more about your focus than any app will.

If your focus has gone completely, or you’re burnt out, start with your GP rather than with me. Coaching with me isn’t a treatment for ADHD, anxiety or burnout.

If you’d like help working out what pulls your attention away and what brings it back, that’s what flow state coaching with me is for. You can start with a free 30-minute discovery call. The coaching itself is practical and built around the work you already do.