I should take a moment and address what the grand goal of this journal is. I am not doing this so that I can work harder. Steve Kotler may get up at 4 am, but I’m not going to. I did an experiment previously in getting up at 5 am for a few months, and even though I was hugely productive, I was kind-of miserable. No, the goal here is to work less. I love working well, make no mistake, and I cannot imagine my life without it. But I believe that truly working at your best requires you to work deeper, but less. I do not intend to work for more than three 90-minute sessions a day, and would preferably like to stick with no more than two. The flow state, you have to remember, is resource intensive. You need to recover. There are two reasons I don’t push much longer than ninety minutes: one is so that I don’t tire myself out too much to recover before the next session, and the other is to create some restriction, in order to create just the right amount of pressure to trigger flow. If I can finish my most important and intense work in three hours a day, I have the rest of the time to read, to exercise, to go for meandering walks (vital for problem solving), and to enrich my life in other ways, such as increasing my learning skills and playing guitar.
The idea is not that I work for three hours and then plop on the couch and eat pizza. There is a place for that, to be sure, and I’m sure it is going to happen sometimes. I want to become more successful in my work by triggering flow and Deep Work states, while also creating the time for a more fulfillment in all other areas of my life. I want to go mountain biking in the woods of British Columbia, not spend my whole day at my desk.
This raises the qusetion of rest and recovery, which I am bad at. Improving this is crucially important to my pursuit of Flow. To be completely honest, my prefered method of recovery at the and of the day is to pour myself a Scotch and sit outside, whilst scheduling the next day’s activities (which reminds me – I’m going to need to talk about scheduling, a lot).
That one session of Deep Work I had this morning is all I’m going to get done for the day. The rest of the day I have to sell my car and pack up my study. Time to make some hard decisions, knowing that everything I keep is something that will be cluttering up my new home. Even though it was only one session, I managed to touch flow and make progress. I don’t expect every session to go that well, but I am expecting the number of sessions that involve flow to increase, on average. Before I leave off for the day, I must consider what to do tomorrow:
- Kick off the day with 3 rounds of my calisthenics routine, then whatever I want to work on (handstands, kettlebells and pull-ups, probably).
- Meditate for 45 minutes, focusing on yogic breathwork.
- Two 90-minutes sessions continuing the work of today.Write down exactly what I need to learn and execute on.
- Put in 45 minutes of Tai Chi.
There are many other things to do, of course, like answering emails and booking accommodation. The above are the things that should be one my list, that take effort and focus. Although I want to do all of them, the two research sessions and the meditation are my main priorities. Everything else is gravy. In the times in-between these, it would be good for me to pay some mind to how I recover between sessions.
Finally, let me speak further to the grand goal of this journal. I mentioned that I have only been snowboarding a couple of times. The first time, somewhere in Alberta (Sunshine, I think), I showed up as a complete newbie. I took a lesson from the local Australian and went on the slope. I was extremely lucky. There was deep, fresh powder everywhere. Just the kind of thing to bolster confidence – you could fall down at speed and laugh about it. It was amazing, and I built up enough confidence to carve out a few turns against the sides and not crash. That night, I was more tired than I had ever been and passed out at eight. My last thought was, “Why the hell does anyone ever bother doing anything else?”
I have been hunting for that feeling again ever since. I know that my destiny is intertwined with the practice of science and mathematics, and that will stay my main focus. I just want to get that feeling again. Is this possible? Can anyone ever have as much fun at work as on the snow? I’m going to find out.
The Flow Diaries 