🚀 The 4-letter F-Word You Should Use Daily: Five Actions To Unlock 500% Productivity Gains Using Flow
You sit down to work on one of those important but deeply engaging activities. Coffee in hand, music on, and you dive in.
After a few false starts, the words start flowing. What feels like 30 minutes turns out to be 3 hours. You've skipped lunch, and you feel amazing.
You finish the day. Report done. On top of the world.
Sound familiar? 🎯
Most of us have experienced this at some point and most, if not all, wonder how we can get more. The experience we are talking about is what scientists call flow.
📊 What is Flow?
Steven Kotler puts it brilliantly in 'The Rise of Superman'.
Flow is more than an optimal state of consciousness—one where we feel our best and perform our best—it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the meaning of life?
Many executives I speak to are aware of the term 'Flow' but not sure on what it is and how to harness it. Flow is an altered state of consciousness where:
- Hyper-focus meets sky-high creativity
- Learning accelerates dramatically
- Performance reaches superhuman levels
🧠 The Neuroscience Behind Peak Performance
Your brain releases a cocktail of performance-enhancing chemicals:
✅ Dopamine
✅ Serotonin
✅ Anandamide
✅ Oxytocin
✅ Noradrenaline
✅ Endorphins
The result? As Kotler put's it above - You don't just feel your best—you perform your best.
📈 The Numbers Don't Lie
- McKinsey's 10-year study: 500% productivity improvement
- DARPA research: 490% faster learning
- Creativity studies: 300% boost in creative output
For senior executives navigating uncertainty and rapid change, this is your competitive advantage.
🔄 The Flow Cycle: Your Roadmap to Peak Performance
Flow is a non-negotiable 4-phase cycle:
1️⃣ Struggle - Staring at the blank page, the urge to check email
2️⃣ Release - Brief disengagement from the task
3️⃣ Flow - The main event
4️⃣ Recovery - Replenish and reset
Unlocking more flow in your life starts with respecting and embracing this cycle. Over the next two weeks I will deep dive each phase giving you the tools you need to access this state regularly.
💡 5 Actions to Access Flow Today:
1. Carve Out Flow Chunks ⏰
Block 60-90 minute sessions. 60 minutes minimum to dive deep, 90 aligns with your natural ultradian rhythms (more on these in an upcoming post).
2. Flow Follows Focus 🎯
📵 Enable Do Not Disturb
📨 Close email
🚪 Shut the office door
🎧 Wear noise-cancelling headphones
🦀 Embrace the hermit
3. Tune the Difficulty 🎚️
Flow shows up most when we are doing something just above our skill level, what we call the "challenge-skills sweet spot". As Kotler puts it, “we bend, but we don’t snap”. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow, identifies this as the mid-point between anxiety and boredom.
Chunk the task you up or down as needed. Finishing the report in 2 hours impossible? Aim for 1000 words. Writing this chunk of code in an hour too easy? Then build all required unit testing and documentation too. Find your goldilocks zone.
4. Recovery as Performance 🚶♂️
The final state of flow - recovery - is non-negotiable. If you want to reliably re-enter the flow cycle you need to recover. For high ROI recovery - Take walks. Find green space. Even better at the same time.
5. Prioritise Sleep 😴
Reframe getting enough high-quality sleep from a luxury to the ultimate performance hack. Quality sleep and flow create a self-reinforcing cycle of peak performance, a deep dive on this coming in a future post too.
The performance benefits here are worth the investment of building these into your life! Trust me!