Read This If You Can't Focus!

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Table of Contents

• Must Read Article💡

• Parker’s Breakdown: 5 C’s Framework 🔑

• The Study 📖

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Must Read Article💡

6 Flow Activities & Training: How to Achieve a Flow State

Have you ever achieved a state where time doesn’t feel real? It seems like you are getting so much done in such little time.

Or you realized you did something for three hours when it felt like it was only thirty minutes. Maybe it was while doing some work early in the morning, or creating music, or writing.

This is the famous state called a flow state.

“Flow in positive psychology, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity” (Wikipedia).

In this article by Positivepsychology.com, they discuss what flow state is, examples of it, and how to get into this state. Here are a couple of the main points. 👇👇

• What Is a Flow State of Mind

• Examples of Flow in Action

  • Music, Gaming, Learning, Hobbies, Sports

• Flow Activities: How to Get Into a Flow State

Parker’s Breakdown: 5 C’s Framework 🔑

To get into my flow state everyday, I follow a set of five “C’s” that help me achieve this state everyday.

The five “C’s” are crucial to a flow state:

1. Clear Goal - Define a specific objective you aim to accomplish within a set timeframe. Having a clear goal provides direction and focus, guiding your actions towards achieving a desired outcome.

   1. Bad Example - “I’m going to knock out some work today for a little bit”

   2. Good Example - “I’m going to finish 8 slides of my sales presentation in the next 50 minutes”

2. Commit - Dedicate a minimum of 45 minutes to uninterrupted work, allowing your mind and body to gradually enter a flow state. The first 10-20 minutes are hard so people tend to get distracted or try to do something else, never allowing themselves to reach the flow state.

    

3. Cast Away Distractions - Eliminate distractions by removing potential interruptions from your environment. This could involve silencing your phone and placing it in another room, turning off notifications or pop ups on your computer or internet browser, wearing headphones with ambient music (I do a lo-fi jazz playlist every time), or creating physical barriers to minimize external disturbances like locking your door. A flow state requires you to be fully immersed without changing the subject of focus.

4. Create Associations - Your brain is constantly creating associations. Sitting in your bed scrolling on your phone will make your brain associate your bed with staying up, making it difficult to fall asleep. In the same way, listening to the same playlist every time you work will make your brain associate that music with working. Similarly, going into the same coffee shop to work will associate that coffee shop and its smells with working, which will help your brain hyper focus and achieve a flow state.

5. Cease Context Changing - Avoid multitasking and context switching by focusing solely on your defined goal. People try to work, but they will answer emails, make calls, finish a presentation, and read an article all in the same hour. Doing this will make it impossible to achieve a flow state and this goes hand and hand with "C" number 1. You need a clear goal that will be the only item you work on and look at the entire time. So if you are working for 2 hours and you want to get a presentation done. Make sure you only do that presentation in those 2 hours.

The Study 📖 

"The Concept of Flow" by Csikszentmihalyi and Nakamura from The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology

The authors introduce the concept of flow, which refers to a state of complete absorption or engagement in an activity. When in a flow state, people become entirely immersed and focused, losing self-consciousness and a sense of time.

For flow to occur, certain conditions must be met:

• The activity must have clear goals and provide immediate feedback.

• There must be a balance between the perceived challenges and the person's skills, with the challenges being slightly greater than the skills.

• The person must have a sense of control over the activity.

When these elements align, people can enter the flow state, characterized by intense concentration, a merging of action and awareness, a loss of self-consciousness, a distorted sense of time, and the experience being intrinsically rewarding.

Flow experiences are described as autotelic - inherently enjoyable regardless of outcome. Getting into flow allows people to be fully immersed, achieve peak performance, and derive great fulfillment from the activity itself.

The authors discuss how cultivating flow experiences can enhance quality of life and psychological well-being. They explore applications of flow across domains like work, sports, arts and everyday activities.

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