Let us flow together.
A 2,000 word journey through my ideal writing morning and a heartfelt case for why entering flow state is a radical act worth striving for.
There’s a fact that gets repeated a lot in all the books and articles I obsessively read about our relationship to tech (including the great book I’m currently reading, Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari) and I can’t hear this fact enough times:
When you’re immersed in a work task, and you get distracted and pulled away by a notification, a text, a whatever, on average it takes you twenty minutes to get back to that immersive, focused state you were in pre-distraction.
Twenty goddamn minutes!
We all want to believe we’ve become masters of multi-tasking, but all our mental switching actually exponentially increases the amount of time it takes to get shit done, while also leaving us with this restless, dissatisfied feeling.
And, of course, once I’m feeling restless and dissatisfied, I turn to the quick fix of the phone, looking for emails or likes or validation in any form I can get it. And the cycle continues.
But the opposite of that way of working—the antidote, if you will—is the kind of focused, immersive mental state known as flow state (a term coined in the 1960s by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi), or deep work (as detailed by Cal Newport in his excellent book).
We’ve all felt this at some point: when you’re so focused on one thing, without distraction, to the extent that you lose all sense of time, and even to some extent, of self. It’s different than the loss of time that comes after falling down an internet rabbit hole, because, in flow state, you’re actively making choices to work toward a goal rather than simply reacting to stimuli that pinball your brain in a bazillion directions before you even realize it.
Flow state might happen while you’re writing, or baking, or acting, or playing a sport, or reading, or building something, or painting, or any other focused, self-directed activity. Even though you’re working toward a goal, the joy is in the process rather than the outcome. So, it feels really fucking good in and of itself, regardless of how well you succeed or what kind of validation you get afterward. You feel calmer. More open. Grounded. More connected to yourself. The focused striving is the reward.
In a moment when every new app or technological development seems designed to make things easier and more convenient, to cut out more and more steps of our life processes, I think that’s worth repeating:
Striving can be a reward, in and of itself.
So, just like taking the phone out of the bedroom, my most ideal writing days involve setting myself up for that level of feel-good focus and flow by knocking out some of these powerful forces that have been engineered specifically to keep us all distracted.
And I should say: I’m not always able to pull this off. Many of my writing days are NOT this. But it is possible! And, as with everything I write on here, part of why I’m sharing is to keep myself as creatively present as possible on a regular basis. (And to maybe get you to start doing this too, so you can tell me how well it’s going and guilt me into being more consistent about it.)
All right, so here’s what an ideal writing day—usually occurring during the hours of 9 am to noon when I have the most creative juice—looks like for me.
Let’s say it’s one of my mornings to drop the kids at school. So I’ve done that. Some days I write at a coffee shop, but I’ve decided today is a work-from-home day. I look in the fridge. I drink some water. I do some dishes. If Katie’s around at that moment, we chat about the kids, about life, about one or two or three of the dozens of random domestic things that need to be handled in the very near future.
I am feeling excited to write but also scared and incredibly resistant. So I am looking for reasons, any reasons, ALL THE REASONS, to not sit down and begin.
But okay. I must begin.
I sit down at my laptop.
Since I don’t trust my willpower alone when competing against the mammoth corporate forces arrayed against us, I’ve used the Freedom app for many years as a tool to help me get into this flow state. It shuts down the wi-fi in my laptop (it can do this to your phone too, if you want) for set amounts of time. I usually do 35- or 45-minute work chunks (I don’t think this phrase is going to catch on), with no longer than five minute breaks in between them.
I don’t use the Freedom app on my phone, in case the kids’ school nurse calls, which does happen sometimes. Or in case Katie calls to tell me that the kids’ school nurse has called. I’m sure I could block the phone’s wi-fi while leaving its cell reception, but look I feel better if my phone isn’t blocked at all, okay? Get off my back!
But I don’t want that phone within reach either, so ideally, I’ve placed it on the other side of the room. If it’s ringing, I’ll go and see what’s up. Otherwise, it’ll have to wait till the end of my work chunk™. And, let’s be real, most things that aren’t the school nurse can wait to be seen for 45 minutes.
So, all right, I’m sitting down at my laptop, my phone is elsewhere, and now a key question arises: How much time will pass before I set the Freedom timer for my first writing sprint?
This is a deceptively simple question. Often I’m like, “What’s the harm in just replying to one email before I start writing?”
But the harm, of course, is this: one email turns into getting distracted by another email, into realizing I have so many unread emails that need to be dealt with so why not go through some of them, into getting a text while I’m doing that, into thinking “I’ll walk over to my phone and see what that text is because I haven’t started writing yet,” into a long text conversation, into oh fuck thirty-two minutes have passed and I haven’t started writing yet oh nooooooo.
I actually find that every minute that passes as I sit at the laptop before I start writing makes it exponentially harder to start writing. Has any scientist officially made this into a law of the universe? Can I? Rubin’s Conundrum: The longer you put off the harder work you want to do in favor of easy, shorter-term tasks, the greater the inertia will be in starting the hard work.
So, yeah. On my ideal writing days, I’ve dealt with any pressing emails in the morning hours while we’re in the kitchen getting the kids ready for school, or I’ve mentally committed myself to replying to those emails later in the day after I write.
Then I can sit down at the laptop, go straight to the doc, set the Freedom timer for 45 minutes, and GET STARTED. I often think of this moment as forcing myself into some kind of writing spaceship and buckling a large seatbelt so I’m unable to escape. I know I’m ultimately going to enjoy the journey, but right now I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS.
So it’s the beginning of my writing session. Regardless of where I left off the previous day, this part usually starts with me feeling horrible about everything. My brain is still revving up, and, more than that, it’s still transitioning from thinking of ALL THE THINGS to thinking of THIS ONE THING. I’m reading what I last wrote, judging it, making tiny adjustments, thinking a lot about what’s supposed to come next and fighting urges to get up and check my phone for some random piece of information that I’ve convinced myself is actually pretty important and justifies pausing my writing for.
It’s usually around the 30 minute mark or so that I start feeling better and getting into some kind of flow. If it’s first-draft writing (as opposed to rewriting), I still may not know exactly where I’m going, but I’m feeling more confident in the exploration. I’ve come to expect that this first session of the writing day is more of a rev-up so, likelier than not, it’s going to be the least productive work chunk of the morning.
The timer goes off, a little box appearing onscreen to tell me my Freedom session has ended.
BREAK TIME I DID A CHUNK I’M SO AMAZING.
But hold on there, pardner. I must warn you it’s astonishingly easy to quickly squander some or all of the momentum you’ve gathered during that first writing sprint by gorging yourself on all the internet has to provide, losing sense of time in the bad way, and inadvertently waiting way longer than five minutes to start your next Freedom session.
I know. It’s happened to me.
Like with everything in our current tech moment, I find I do best when I make mindful decisions about my time rather than just letting things unfold on their own. So I set the timer on my phone for anywhere from three to five minutes.
During this break, I start by looking at what texts and emails have come in to make sure there’s nothing urgent. So I do this very brief scan, no replies unless it’s a simple thumbs-up reaction. (Or thumbs-down if the text I got really sucked heh heh!!!) Then I might stretch, pee, or get a snack. Sometimes I throw or bounce a ball for a minute as I think about what I’m about to dive into during the next work chunk. This could also be a good moment to rest your brain with a quick jaunt into the NYTimes app, maybe play Wordle, but ONLY IF YOU KNOW YOU’LL BE ABLE TO DO IT WITHOUT GETTING SUCKED INTO THE LARGER INTERNET VORTEX.
Last fall, when I was deep into writing the first draft of the YA novel I’m working on, I got in a rhythm of doing a few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on my breaks, and I really loved it. So that can work too. If you enjoy puzzles. As I do. Very much.
But ok, back into the next chunk. By this one, I really start to get into the flow, and even more in the third. Depending on how I’ve done on regulating my break times, I may even have time (and brain energy) for a fourth writing sprint—by then I’m so locked-in that even just twenty minutes can be really productive.
Because that’s the thing about all this. If all has gone according to plan—or even semi-according to plan—the world will have fallen away to some extent. You will have gotten out of your own way, and your brain will have begun to surprise you. Ideas will spontaneously arise. New character backstories will surface. Knotty plot issues will slowly loosen. And, whether it shows up in your word-count or not, you will be pushing your work forward in a way that feels nourishing and productive on levels you can never quite match when you’re juggling everything at once.
And you will feel good. Fulfilled. Grounded. No likes or comments necessary.
Whether you’re calling it deep work or flow state or something else, I think it’s about giving yourself and your brain the space to operate freely, to slough off the thousands of other things trying to invade your consciousness every minute of the day. When seen in that context, flow state starts to look like a refuge, a balm, and maybe even a superpower, all wrapped up in one.
I highly recommend finding a moment to try it. It doesn’t have to be three hours; it could be blocking off a half-hour to write an email you want to put some thought into. Or blocking off some time for any other single work task and seeing what it’s like to do it with no interruptions.
In this moment when the checking of all the things has become so baked into our daily experience of being humans, making the decision to not do that for a set amount of time, so that you can focus more deeply on one thing, can be a very radical decision.
So give it a whirl. Some radical distraction-free work chunks™. And then tell me you’re doing it so I’ll keep doing it too.
Love this. I also find that writing first thing helps me get into the flow (before too many other tasks or distractions pile up) and that doing sprints helps me focus long enough to get in the groove. In fact, I did two Pomodoros (25 min of work followed by 5 min break) this morning and wrote 1200 new words!