Daniel Pink spoke often of getting into the flow in his book Drive. You know you’ve been in flow when you look up and you’ve completely lost track of time. You’re so engaged in your work that time is not a consideration. You’re in the flow.
Even though I experience it on a regular basis I hadn’t heard the word recently until an article by Srinivas Rao titled “What it takes to lead an extremely high flow life” caught my eye. The hints that it took to get into high flow included:
- Avoid Interruptions
- Work for long enough to get into flow
- Do deep work
Sounds simple enough. Every team I work with lately is telling me how wonderful it is to avoid the interruptions of their daily routines. Avoiding the interruptions rewards them with the time they need to really get into some deep work. NOT!
Every team I’m engaged with is asking me to help them with the stress and pressure of their business lives. I’m observing mental stress, emotional stress, and physical stress. People are getting sick, losing touch with their family and friends and feeling that they never have enough time to get into the work that they’re good at, enjoy and have been hired to accomplish.
Why have we allowed these things to happen to us? Everybody seems to understand that it’s happening and it’s destructive but there seems to be a sense of helplessness to get out of the tornado, plant your feet on the ground and get some work done. Why?
I believe one of the reasons (maybe the main one) is that we’ve lost our ability to say No! I just finished reading “The Power of a Positive No”. It’s good to understand why we’re hesitant to say No. The book offers what it calls the Three-A Trap:
- Accommodate: We say yes when we want to say no.
- Attack: We say no poorly
- Avoid: We say nothing at all
And The Combination is the deadly mix of all three. Our reasons for not saying No are powerful; I don’t want to lose my job, I don’t want to damage our relationship, I don’t want to look ignorant, and the list goes on. But what are we doing by not saying No? Destruction and falling short of our goals. Not good things.
The simple word decide can be an answer. Think of all the words you know that end in “cide”. Cide in Latin means “put to death”. When we decide, we’re not supposed to keep saying yes to everything. We’re supposed to declare what we’re not going to do so that we can accomplish the important things.
Have you decided what you’re not going to do today? It’s the only way to get into deep work and flow. Enjoy the journey.
