Flow State

Flow state is the antidote to all my weaknesses that get in the way of me collecting all the skills and knowledge I have now.

My weaknesses are aplenty. I am lazy. I daydream. I don’t like to follow timetables. I am easily distracted and very often go down the Internet rabbit hole. There are voices that tell me all the way things will go wrong. Despite all of these, I can be super productive for hours at a stretch and that is how I have, well, what I have.

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly gave it this name and popularized it as a concept. I knew this feeling before I heard about this man who’s name I can’t pronounce but he is the one named it and you and I can talk about this easily.

When I am in the flow state, the work I am doing is the only thing in my mind. I lose the sense of time, emotions, and ego among other things. The work in front of me completely captivates me. I don’t want to stop. Ideas flow. It goes on for hours. I feel proud and happy only after I get out of this.

My history with this is goes like this. It was hard to put a finger when I first could get into this. It's probably when I was reading fiction. This was before I was in my teens, when I could be totally immersed in books. Then I got to a whole new level while studying in high school. I was getting really good marks in primary school but as the years progressed, my marks and rank were falling gradually and I was headed toward mediocrity. But I turned this around in high school. I took a whole new approach. That was when I became a thinking person. Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics got so advanced but very interesting. I had a lot of quality, complex questions to answer in front of me. I was still a lazy, distracted person who didn’t want to sit down and study. But when I do sit, hours will pass before I get up. This is the story of how I became an engineer.

Work is also like this. I had a nine-to-five job. But also, it will be 20 percent of the time when I will do 80 percent of the work. It is painful sitting in the office when I am not in the flow state. Things happened and now I have arrangements as a freelancer so I do good work, and earn good money while having a lot of free time to pursue other interests.

The battle with procrastination is still going on. When I don’t like something or when there are a lot of negative feelings involved, I don’t do things. So what I do now is whenever I don’t get into a flow state with some task, I take a step back, analyse what is causing the procrastination, brainstorm, and do meta-work so I can get into the flow state. This I do by trial and error. I am still a bit sloppy with something. But when I crack this fully, there is no stopping me!