I am constantly amazed at the amount of work I can get done if I just knuckle down to it. It is amazing — if I have a well thought out list of Next Actions to work with, I can plough through them quickly and thoroughly enjoy myself in the process. I am in the “Flow”. It is such a great feeling to get lots of work done, especially if some of the tasks have been hanging around my neck for days, or months, or even years in some cases.
The smallest, simplest tasks, that may take less than five minutes to complete, can hang around until the end of time if I let them. There is usually some variety of fear involved, probably because I don’t properly understand the task or because the task isn’t broken down into its smallest parts or Next Actions. But if one day I do manage to clear a task that has been on my task list every day for the last 6 months, has been pestering me every day for the last 6 months, has been in my consciousness for all that time, nagging, making itself look much bigger and scarier than it actually is… when I do that task and it takes 2.5 minutes and was so easy I could have done it with my eyes closed, I think “bloody hell that was easy, why didn’t I do it months ago? Why did I let it bother me so much for all that time?” And then I look at the rest of those long time nagging tasks and I think to myself, right, I will knuckle down and clear all those tasks out of the way so I never have to worry about them again. Then I will be free. Free to exercise my imagination, my creativity, and start on all those ideas that I have been having for months but don’t remember very well because I didn’t write them down. But when all those nagging tasks are done, I know that all my ideas will come back to me, along with some new ones, because I will be free of that feeling of overwhelm.
Of course, when tomorrow arrives I have forgotten about yesterday and how well it went. I don’t even get round to looking at my list of Next Actions until after lunch because I got an email first thing that sent me off on a long wasted morning of tangential tasks that were never on my task list, and never would be if I actually stopped and thought about what I was doing.
I get to the end of the day without being in the Flow state at all, so I am angry with myself for wasting my day. But tomorrow, I say to myself, will be great. I write everything down that I will do tomorrow, in great detail. But when morning comes, I feel tired, or unwell, so I play Freecell for a bit to get my mind working, then check my email, which might send me off on a tangent again, and I surf the internet, find articles to read, read them, promptly forget what I read because there was no good reason to read it in the first place, nothing to hang it on. So I get to the end of the day, annoyed with myself. So I write another list for tomorrow, or just write tomorrow’s date at the top of today’s task list.
Tomorrow arrives. I have completely forgotten about the list I wrote yesterday or the day before. A mass of tasks floods my consciousness. I am overwhelmed. I feel sick because I don’t know what to do next. I pick at one task that looks like it might be easy enough for me to do, but in a moment of inattention my mind wanders to another task that I should do or would like to do, and I spend the day flitting from one task to the next, not finishing any of them. At the end of the day I am angry with myself… and so on.
After a few days or weeks of this “no-Flow” state, I have another great day. I think to myself that if every day was like this I could move mountains… but it rarely lasts more than a day.
How can I get into the “Flow” state every day? Well that is one of the reasons for this blog: to help me to end my days feeling that I couldn’t have done any better, because I was in the “Flow”.