Cultivating a Natural State of Flow

Flow, or the Zone

A few months ago I started seeing podcasts and other discussions of Flow online. It seems to be a new term for what has long been called getting into The Zone, meaning a focused and highly productive state of mind.

One of the first things I remember seeing about Flow was this brief panel discussion:

In other videos, which you can find on YouTube via links from that one, they discuss how to create more opportunities for this state of flow, in other words how to ‘cultivate a natural state of flow’.

I’ve been trying this, and it’s been working!

I can’t say whether it’s the specific techniques –creating a work environment with fewer distractions, allocating time for a specific task, meditation—or just the fact that I’m more conscious of the state and my desire to get into it. I have also found the suggestions from Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning quite helpful. Particularly meditation. If you want to jump quickly to a relevant discussion, the interview at the end of the audiobook was very good.

I find that I’m able to achieve those states of high productivity more often. This means that I’m much more efficient with my time while working and enjoy my work more. Sometimes I can get things done in less time, leaving more time for other fun things.

“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.”

--Lao Tzu

Does anyone else have any experiences or resources to share about Flow or The Zone?

S. Lan Smith

Hamburg, Germany

October 2, 2016

Thanks to everyone who produced and made freely available the images used herein.