How to Achieve Laser Focus and Sustained Flow

Productivity bloggers place a lot of emphasis on granularity. According to accepted wisdom, if a task squats on your list for a while, you probably haven’t sliced and diced it enough. Solution: Start carving until you’re left with a “next action” that you can effortlessly knock off in 10 minutes flat.

But some tasks simply don’t lend themselves to the GTD slice-and-dice. They demand time, focus, and sustained concentration for half an hour or more. Some typical examples:

• Planning
• Designing
• Outlining
• Writing
• Brainstorming
• Polishing

When I need to do manuscript editing, I can’t slice things up much smaller than a chapter, and even a pass on a single chapter in some books can take a couple hours or more of sustained, uninterrupted concentration.

There are two obstacles to achieving this level of sustained flow: the constant barrage of information and distractions and “need it now” problems we all face, and the fluctuating levels of mental energy we can bring to bear throughout the day. How do we find the time and mental energy for the big stuff while juggling all the tiny-but-still-important stuff?

When Are You Smartest?

Face it. There comes a point in every day that you simply aren’t at your best. No one stays sharp 24/7. My wife is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 5 am for her morning jog; when she’s nodding off around 11pm, I’m buzzing to edit some podcasts.

So the first step in regaining sustained flow is to map out a typical day’s mental performance: Print out a blank day calendar and leave it next to your desk. Schedule a reminder to go off every hour. For one entire day, mark off your energy level on a scale from 1 to 3 every time your reminder goes off.

At the end of the day, plug the results into Google Spreadsheets and graph it. The result will give you a basic sense of how your energy fluctuates from hour to hour. These fluctuations are partly based on what you eat, partly based on how much sleep you get, and so on, but all things being equal, you usually follow a pattern, and by determining that pattern, you can learn to work with it instead of against it.

Night owls will probably always be night owls, and the sooner you learn to love your owly nature, the sooner you’ll start maximizing that productive time and easing up on yourself when you’re brain is in hibernate mode.

Find the Quiet Times, or Make Them

Just as your brain and body fluctuates from nimrod to ninja and back again, your work interruptions have their own pace and rhythm. Sometimes the phone calls and emails never stop. Other times, crickets are chirping by the water machine. And while it often feels like these interruptions come in random bursts (“Boy, it’s busy for a Wednesday afternoon!”), there’s usually an overall pattern.

One way to get a quick sense of this is to look at the times of your incoming emails and voicemails. See any clusters? My emails tend to flow in fastest from around 10am to 11am, as people settle in and get rolling. They taper during lunch, pick up around 3pm, and taper again well before 5pm. That’s my pattern, so I know to forget looking for a free hour during those peak interruption times. Your schedule may vary, so pay attention to when things feel craziest during the day and reserve those periods for doing small, easily interruptable tasks. Like calling and emailing everyone else!

(Some productivity gurus argue for checking email twice a day or even less. In my job, emails are often used instead of phone calls to get someone’s attention right away, for a meeting or an urgent issue. I can’t afford to shut it off indefinitely, and I assume that some of you have the same issue.

Trying to do something that requires heavy concentration and just wishing that distractions will magically stop is a recipe for frustration.

Matching Peak Performance to Perfect Stillness

Now you should have two maps: One of your mental energy throughout the day, and one indicating the ebb and flow of external interruptions. Find the spot where your mental energy is usually at its highest and your interruptions are usually at your lowest. That’s Golden Time.

You may not even have any Golden Time in your workday, as it stands. Adding some might be as simple as showing up at the office half an hour earlier than you normally do. Or staying a bit later. Or even moving your lunch hour so that you’re back from lunch just when everyone else leaves.

Either way, once you’ve identified some Golden Time, don’t squander it. Often, when we hit that beautiful lull in the week when our minds are active and our phones are quiet, we find it most appealing to procrastinate. We decide to pick a new WordPress theme or organize our contacts. When we have time and energy, we tend to feel like our time and energy are boundless and inexhaustible. But Golden Time is precious. When you hit that patch, think of Pac-Man when he eats the super pellet: You have a perfect opportunity to knock out the ghosts that have been squatting on your task list for days, but only for a short duration. When Golden Time arrives, try any and all of the following (if possible) to get the most out of it:

• Quit out of email.
• Turn off your phone ringers.
• Close your door. Put up a sign on your door asking for peace.
• Disable Twitter, Facebooks, IM, etc.
• Shut off your Internet connection/WiFi altogether.
• Use an app like WriteRoom to isolate the window you’re working in.
• Set a timer to go off when your next appointment or meeting is almost due to begin.

You’ll get more done in 30 minutes of this than you would in frustrating dribs and drabs across an entire week. And this technique will allow you to stop worrying about big tasks you can’t focus on and devote what energy and concentration you do have to the small but necessary stuff.

Photo by andreapacelli.