How To Maintain Your Focus And Find Your Flow

Amp up your motivation and get in the zone!

Have you ever had one of those days where time moves so slow it almost stops, but by the end of it you STILL haven’t finished your to-do list? Regardless of how much you love your work, this kind of day can make the easiest of tasks be an absolute brain melt. But then there’s the other side of the coin. The day when everything goes to plan and works so seamlessly that you’re halfway through your week of work by Monday evening and, man, you feel good. You’re indestructible. Nothing can stop you now. Who needs a motivational meme when you’re feeling this inspired?! And that state - where you are focused, productive, and completely immersed in your work - is something we call “flow”.

This isn’t a new concept, it’s been around for a while. Back in 1990 (which was over 20 years ago now, yup….) a Hungarian Psychologist called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, in which he defined the flow state as: “the intense experiential involvement in moment-to-moment activity; it can only be achieved on the basis of an individual’s’ personal effort and creativity.”

In the book, Csikszentmihalyi further defines flow as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” In order to achieve this state, he recommends the following circumstances be in place:

• There are clear goals every step of the way.
• There is immediate feedback to one’s actions.
• There is a balance between challenges and skills.
• Action and awareness are merged.
• Distractions are excluded from consciousness.
• There is no worry of failure.
• Self-consciousness disappears.
• The sense of time becomes distorted.
• The activity becomes an end in itself.

The American Psychological Association is pretty much on the same page as Csikszentmihalyi with their definition of flow being:

“A state of optimal experience arising from intense involvement in an activity that is enjoyable, such as playing a sport, performing a musical passage, or writing a creative piece. Flow arises when one’s skills are fully utilized yet equal to the demands of the task, intrinsic motivation is at a peak, one loses self-consciousness and temporal awareness, and one has a sense of total control, effortlessness, and complete concentration on the immediate situation (the here and now).”

A Goldfish Has More Focus Than You

The average attention span of a human is 8 seconds, which is less than the attention span of a goldfish. And the rise of the 24/7 online digital world has reduced that attention span even further. So the question is, how do we get into this flow state other than by chance? (i.e. those lucky days when you wake up and just “feel” in the zone without having actually planned it out). How do you make flow a consistent part of your working day rather than an opportunity that you have to make the most of when it happens to drop by?

All hope is not lost, says Elie Vanezy, author of Hack Your Brain. Elie maintains that focus is a muscle that can be built, so basically all you need is a good brain workout (and maybe a protein shake). Elie believes that too many people get stuck on the idea that they’re just not able to focus and this becomes a “self-fulfilling prophecy”. Once you ditch that negative thought process, you CAN build and regain your focus with a more realistic approach.

How To Achieve True Focus and Flow

Always Be Present & Avoid Distractions

Whoever said time travel wasn’t real, really didn’t think it through. I mean, sure, we can’t physically transport through time, but I’d place a heavy bet that at least some of your day is spent thinking about what you did yesterday or what you’re doing tomorrow, next week, or even next year. And when you’re inundated with work, the escapism of time travel eats up the very time you NEED to get that work completed!

Once you get out of “the zone”, research says it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back into it. Not too bad, right? No, it’s not. Not if you’re staying 100% focused the rest of the time. But if you’re dipping in and out of flow every hour then your productivity is taking one serious blow.

You need to focus on the task right in front of you to stay focused and in flow, and the best way to achieve that is by creating a checklist that allows you to dump everything out of your brain and on to that screen. Prioritize the list, add some deadlines, and within minutes your stress will dissipate and your focus will increase. Why? Because now you’re moving into uninterrupted flow, the place where all that matters is what you’re doing right now so you can focus on what’s directly in front of you.

Your phone is one of the biggest distractions of all. You don’t have to turn off ALL of your notifications but notification settings are there for a reason, so use them! In Buckets, you can customize your push notifications and prioritize items so that you only see exactly what you want to see. Once you’ve customized your notifications, we won’t interrupt you with anything that you don’t deem essential to the task at hand.

Let’s Talk More About That Checklist

Creating a checklist is just about the easiest and fastest way that you can plan and prioritize your work. AND it will motivate you to complete it. Adding step-by-step tasks to a checklist that you can tick off along the way is very rewarding and will show you that you’re getting closer and closer to your goal, whatever it may be (i.e. just finishing all of your tasks for the day, or working towards achieving a later goal). It’s important to make sure that both the end goals and the actions on your checklist are clear and well-defined in order for this process to work optimally, as any ambiguity will lead to stress and upheaval and throw your flow out of whack.

“You don’t task yourself to build a wall but instead you task yourself to lay that brick as perfectly as that brick can be laid. Then within time, the wall will be built — Will Smith

Figure Out Your Focus

If your to-do list is a mile long then it’s easy to start to feel completely overwhelmed by it, but all of this can be handled by just figuring out where your focus needs to be. When prioritizing your list, think about where your focus should be in the long-term, short-term, and mid-term, and this will make sure that the actions you take to succeed this week will further fuel your success in the long run,

Love The Work You Do

Not everyone is going to love their jobs. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who loves absolutely every part of their work. However, what you can do is find the things you DO love about it and utilize that to get you into the flow state. If you instinctively think “oh no” when you look at tasks on your checklist, you’re going to avoid them, you’re going to keep moving them to the bottom of the list, and you can say goodbye to any kind of focus — because those tasks might be at the bottom but they’re still there lurking to kick you in the backside when you go over deadline.

Create Habits

You’ve heard the saying that we’re all “creatures of habit” and there’s a reason for that. It’s true. Building routines and creating habits that we repeat on a regular basis is what increases our confidence in our abilities to succeed in both daily and general tasks. A regular daily routine will help you to stay focused and in flow because your brain can relax into this pattern and easily allow for extra focus when needed.

Think about the last time you had a crazy chaotic day and a colleague asked you to do something extra for them, something easy that would take 20 minutes, how did you react? It’s likely that you got stressed and either agreed and didn’t do the work to your full ability, or refused and still didn’t even get your own work done anyway because you didn’t have a routine in the first place! If this sounds like you, a checklist really is your first port of call. Scroll up and reread that section if you need to, and click here to create yours on Buckets as soon as you’ve finished reading.

Take A Break, Have A KitKat

It’s no secret that taking a break will boost your energy. One of the primary ways to maintain your focus is to take short breaks throughout the day. In fact, a study by Psychologist Aljenadro Lleras which studies “vigilance decrement”, i.e. the loss of focus over time, found that participants who took short breaks during a 50-minute task performed better than those who took no breaks at all. Use something like a stopwatch or a digital time tracker to get an alert every time you need to take a short timeout and this will immediately improve your focus without interrupting your flow.

What To Do When You Get Stuck

Every now and then, you’ll get stuck mid-flow and your instinctive reaction will be to give up for the day because “that’s it, I’ve lost my mojo”. But that’s not it, trust me. In his book I referred to earlier, Csikszentmihalyi recommends the following creative exercises when you feel like you’re stuck in a rut.

• Take a different approach to the challenge. Stretch your imagination and think outside the box so that you can look at the problem from a new angle.
• Raise the bar. Let yourself believe you are capable of more. When you reach your goal, set another!
• Don’t be afraid to take a chance and trust that you will succeed. When that risk pays off, your confidence increases and your belief in your own abilities will soar.
• Throw yourself into unfamiliar situations that bring you out of your comfort zone. This will open your mind to new perspectives and solutions you may never have considered before.

The Key Is To Practice, Practice, and Practice Some More

The key to staying focused and in flow is to practice these methods on a regular basis. This will make flow a steady component of your everyday routine rather than something that arises out of the blue once a week if you’re lucky.

Practice these methods and take note of what works for you, and when you find it, repeat it, and keep repeating it until it becomes second nature. Once you get into the pattern of productivity that is best suited to YOU, you will find yourself falling into a state of flow without even thinking about it. For further reading on how to get on top of a busy schedule, check out our previous blog post: Make The List… And Make Some More!

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