Yellow flag loves marshy ground.
How To Experience
Flow and Get Crazy Productive
Dr. Travis Bradberry
The average person has 70,000 thoughts each day, and if
you don’t learn to organize them,
they have the potential to wreak havoc on your
productivity.
When you succumb to the flurry of thoughts running
through your head,
your mind becomes disorganized, and the more you ruminate
on intrusive thoughts,
the more power you give them.
Most of our thoughts are just that—thoughts, not facts.
When you find yourself believing the negative,
distracting, and pessimistic things
your inner voice says, it’s very hard to slow down the
momentum of your thoughts.
In a recent study conducted at the National Institute on
Aging, it was found that allowing
your mind to be disorganized doesn’t just
feel bad, it’s also actually bad for you.
A disorganized mind leads to high stress, chronic
negativity, and impulsivity.
These states stifle productivity and contribute to a slew
of health problems,
including weight gain, heart disease, sleep problems, and
migraine headaches.
Edward Hallowell, a therapist who helps people deal with
disorganized minds,
describes what happens when someone falls victim to his
myriad of invasive thoughts:
“He makes impulsive judgments, angrily rushing to bring
closure. He is robbed of his flexibility,
his sense of humor, and his ability to deal with the
unknown. He forgets the big picture
and the goals and values he stands for. He loses his
creativity and his ability to change plans.”
An organized mind, on the other hand, falls into a state
of flow. Flow is a blissful state of balance, where you are fully immersed in a
task, completely free from distracting thoughts.
Flow states enable you to enjoy your work and perform at
the peak of your potential.
Research shows people working in a state of flow
are five times more productive than they’d otherwise be.
“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and
no holding back,
the way it is with children.” –Rainer Maria Rilke
Here are five steps that I use to organize and declutter
my mind, find flow,
and keep myself on track for a productive day.
Step 1: Find the
Right Amount of Challenge in What You Do
When you’re trying to get work done, it’s easy to lose
focus and succumb to intrusive thoughts
when the task at hand is too challenging or too easy. We
thrive on a healthy challenge—
something that simulates us without being so difficult
that it produces anxiety
or so simple that it induces boredom. When you consciously and
carefully choose a task,
you greatly increase your chance of achieving flow.
Step 2: Take
Control of Your Emotions
While it’s impossible to control how things make you
feel, you have complete control over
how you react to your emotions. First, you need to be
honest with yourself
about what you are feeling and why you are feeling it.
From there, it’s much easier to channel
the emotion into producing the behavior that you want.
The key is to identify and label
your emotions as you experience them. Associating words
with what you are feeling
makes the emotion tangible and less mysterious. This
helps you to relax, figure out
what’s behind your emotion, and move forward. If you try
to stifle your emotions and tackle
your work without addressing them, they will slowly eat
away at you and impair your focus.
Step 3: Sustain
Your Focus
We all know that frustrating feeling of sitting down to
tackle something important,
only to quickly lose focus when we expected to dive right
into the task.
It takes time for your mind to become fully immersed in
an activity.
Studies have shown that it takes five to twenty minutes
before people start to focus.
If you can force yourself to persist in the activity in
spite of any distractions for twenty minutes,
the chances are much higher that you will be able to
sustain your focus and find a state of flow.
The best way to do this is to put away or turn off all of
your typical distractions (phones, e-mail, social media), then keep an eye on
the clock until you’ve done nothing but your task
for a good 20 minutes, even if you aren’t getting much
done.
Chances are that things will really start cooking for you
once you hit the twenty-minute mark.
Step 4: Take
Breaks
Our brains and bodies simply aren’t wired for prolonged
periods of work. While it might seem
as though sitting at your desk for eight hours straight
is the best way to get all of your work done, this can work against you.
Research has shown that the most productive work cycle
tends to be fifty-two minutes of uninterrupted work,
followed by seventeen-minute breaks.
While it probably isn’t realistic to structure your
schedule this rigidly,
for most people, the battle is won by just remembering to take breaks.
Just be certain to pepper several short breaks throughout
your day.
Step 5: Shift Sets
Once you’ve taken a break, you must shift your focus back
to your task.
No matter how “in the zone” you were before taking a
break, you’ll sometimes find that
you’re back to square one when it comes to focus. To do a
proper set shift,
you have to reorganize your thoughts by following steps one
through four above,
especially if you’re having trouble diving back into the task. You’ll find that getting back
into flow quickly after a break is very doable, but it must be done
purposefully.
Bringing It All
Together
Organizing your mind to experience flow isn’t
particularly difficult, but it does require attention
and monitoring. Lean on these five steps any time you
need to get more done.
Have you experienced flow? Please share your thoughts in
the comments section below
as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-experience-flow-get-crazy-productive-dr-travis-bradberry
You
can TCR software and
engineering manuals for spontaneous recall
– or pass that exam.
I
can Turbo
Charge Read a
novel 6-7 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
I
can TCR an
instructional/academic book around 20 times faster and remember
what I’ve read.
Perhaps
you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
All
aspects of regular, each-word down-each-line reading and education.
Turbo
Charged Reading uses these skills significantly faster.
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com many
ways for you to work with the stresses of life
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com just for fun.
To quote the
Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more
that you learn; the more places you'll go.”
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