The state of flow

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we?

[00:00:16] It has been weeks since I was able to sit down and just code for a long time. The longest single coding session I've been able to do in the last two months was maybe two or three hours. Now that is very different from last year where there were plenty of days where I would spend the full eight hours of the workday just coding with maybe some short breaks to check a few emails or Twitter.

[00:00:49] So now I'm actually struggling to find a sense of flow when I do get some time to code, and I find myself feeling very distracted and fragmented. When you've been distracted and fragmented a lot, it almost becomes a habit – an instinct. It's like when you get bored, you find yourself reaching for your phone, even when you don't need to.

[00:01:12] You don't even think about it, it just happens. That was a habit actually, that was incredibly hard for me to break. And once in a while, I still have to get hyper cognizant of my phone habits and partially retrain myself not to mindlessly reach for it, but I have gotten much better about it. So getting into and being able to stay in a flow state is also something you just have to do a lot of in order for it to stick and become natural.

[00:01:43] Something I've been terrible about recently is leaving Slack open on my monitor. The notifications will be snoozed, but the Slack window will be open. So I'll see the visual indications of notifications and activity, even if I don't hear them. So I'm going to start actively closing the Slack window a lot more when I want to focus.

[00:02:07] Another thing that's happened recently, by way of a lot of the chaos I've been experiencing at work, is that I've stopped emptying my mind of all the to-do items in the morning. I still make a plan, but I don't write _everything down_. That has to stop. When we leave things in our minds, they bug us and distract us.

[00:02:29] It's better to just download all of that onto paper or an app or something. So I gotta start doing that again. The other thing that's happened during the last few months is that I haven't been able to carve out time to, you know, get productive during my biological peak time: the time when I have high energy, high willpower, and high focus.

[00:02:54] For me, those peak times tend to shift throughout the month. I'm a woman, so paying attention to my hormonal cycle is a big part of my personal productivity, except that I've been silly for the last couple months and forgot that my routines need to change with the phases of the moon, just a little bit.

[00:03:12] For example, right now the best time for me to focus is going to be the afternoons, but I know that in about two weeks my best focus time will happen in the mornings. I've also been actively reducing my caffeine intake for the last month in preparation for Ramadan, which is the Islamic month where I'll fast from dawn till sunset every day for about 28 days.

[00:03:35] And while I don't think I drink enough coffee to be addicted, it's possible that my body is used to getting at least some caffeine throughout the week and not having it is making me experience some minor withdrawal symptoms. That's just a guess though. I'm not actually sure if that's happening.

[00:03:57] So to get to being able to slip into flow state more regularly, again, I have to start paying attention to my environment and also to my personal energy levels, and maybe even try to take in a little more caffeine perhaps – in the short term, anyway. We've talked about all of these things a lot on the podcast before.

[00:04:24] So none of this is new if you've been listening for a while, but I guess I myself needed a reminder, and who knows, maybe you did too. These are the kind of things that are easy to forget, and so we often have to keep reminding ourselves again and again, you know?

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.