Every minute spent in a wasteful meeting eats into time for solo work that’s equally essential for creativity and efficiency. (10) And that seems a reasonable proposition. No wonder we’re fed up with that as 80% of remote workers agree one day/week with no meetings would be great. (9) We run meetings to kick off the day, check in with the team, solve problems, brainstorm ideas, make plans, and give status updates. (8) Executives spend 21.5 hours of a typical work week doing so. The average knowledge worker has 8 meetings/week. Need to make some calls or chat with customers? Hook up with a video conferencing app and watch some talking heads in high quality. Want to manage your client database? There’s a CRM platform for that. You work when you’re the most productive, there’s no watercooler chit-chat, and nobody’s looking over your shoulder.īut remote work, especially in the post-pandemic world, has its challenges. Remote work and flow state seem like a perfect match. The activity should be just above your skill level, you need clear feedback on the progress, and most importantly, no context switching is allowed ergo you can’t multitask. Whether you want to write an email, outline a business strategy, create marketing materials, or brainstorm new ideas, getting in the zone will help you excel.īut achieving a state of flow requires the right conditions. The flow state boosts productivity, improves creativity, reduces stress, and makes work fun. □♀️ Physical needs take the back seat.□ The activity itself becomes rewarding.✊ You feel in total control of the present.□ You uncover hidden productivity reserves.So, how do you know if you’re in a flow state? Even your perception of time seems to change. The activity itself becomes so rewarding, that all other things fade into the background. In a nutshell, you get into a flow state when you focus on a single task and ignore everything else. The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (5) “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times. Csikszentmihalyi defined this experience as a flow state, a metaphor for the flow of water. In a 1975 study, Csikszentmihalyi formulated a theory that a good and fulfilled life is achieved through complete immersion in whatever we do. □♂️ The Importance of Flow State at Work But context switching doesn’t only cost you time and focus. The more complex or unrelated tasks you’re dealing with, the higher the penalty. “I do kinda feel like my head is full! My context switching penalty is high and my process isolation is not what it used to be. In a 2015 AMA, Elon Musk himself admitted that he doesn’t do well with handling multiple tasks (read: he’s not a robot). The researchers behind the study also discovered that the penalty is higher for more complex and unfamiliar tasks. While most people do that on a daily basis-the switching, not real multitasking-context switching leads to what’s known as a cognitive switch penalty.Ī series of experiments conducted in 2001 found that every “jump” between tasks takes a toll on concentration. Unlike multi-core CPUs coupled with fast random-access memory (RAM), the human brain doesn’t do well with switching between tasks. A silicon chip etched with microscopic circuits switches cleanly from instruction to instruction, agnostic to the greater context from which the current instruction arrived: op codes are executed electrons flow the circuit clears the next op code is loaded.” Cal Newport, “Our Brains Are Not Multi-Threaded” (2) “ the human brain is not a computer processor. The process is super-efficient, but it doesn’t happen in parallel. In computing, context switching happens when a processor (CPU) jumps between two or more tasks, executing them as needed. Heck, even computers can’t really multitask. Good luck with that, because multitasking is a myth, just like unicorns. Think you’re pretty good at multitasking? Try counting to 100 while watching Netflix and keeping up an intelligible conversation with your team. People are hard-wired to focus on one thing at a time.
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