(pssst…. just want to get the Flowstate Journal?)
It feels like this,
Do you feel stressed, anxiety, on the verge of overwhelm for the most of the day
Do you procrastinate a lot?
Do you find task switching challenging and brutally long, does it take you frustratingly forever to ramp up to a task, wind down a task, and require a lot of decompression time before going onto the next activity or task?
Do you wake up with an immediate sense of overwhelm of everything you need to do that day?
Does life and things you do seem unenjoyable, flavorless and unsatisfying and just a task you need to check off?
Are you absent from what you’re doing, losing a sense of presence and flow, not optimal in what you’re doing?
Do you feel like you have so much more to give but don’t know how to access it? Leaving so much on the table?
Do you have a endless list of things you want to do but it always gets pushed to the back burner? Which then adds to your guilt, regret and overwhelm, which makes it difficult to do anything else, which then creates a vicious loop?
Do you get easily drained and fatigued throughout the day? Have a very limited supply of energy? Easily irritable and annoyed?
Do you feel like you can’t really focus on what you’re doing? Can’t bring all of who you are, to everything you do?
But you want to,
Do you want to improve your productivity but don’t know where to start?
Do you want to feel like having an endless supply of energy throughout the day?
Do you want to be able to switch between tasks easily, fluidly without any downtime?
Do you want be able to finish tasks, projects, or work in a quarter of the time?
Do you want to have more sustained consistent energy throughout the day?
I’ve been there, done all of it.
I used to think anxiety was the norm, it was something I just needed to push through, grind out. No pain, no gain right? Wait a second, back up, before that I didn’t even realize I was under this constant low-key stress and anxiety. Like buzzing fluorescent lights you forget are there, cause your mind is constantly working to tune out. I thought that’s just how things are supposed to be. Are you feeling the same way? Asking yourself, when does it get better and how is this sustainable? How do you free yourself from stress, anxiety and overwhelm without having to become a monk and move to the mountains? I won’t say I can eliminate stress without having to live in a “bubble”. We encounter stress triggers everyday. But what I think I can help with is understanding, observing and building resilience to the stress that robs us of the energy, focus, intention and ability to be present in our daily lives. So that we can bring everything we are to everything we do, what I call Flowstate Productivity. Flowstate is the goal. The goal isn’t an outcome, result, expectation or measure of success. Those come because of Flowstate Productivity.
Achieving Flowstate Productivity you can,
- Be able to easily access and perform at your highest abilities, decisions and actions
- Reap a seemingly endless supply of energy, while constantly being recharged
- An anticipation of optimism, confidence and enthusiasm for everything you do
- Switch between tasks without any ramp up, wind down or down time.
- Be completely present in what you’re doing, losing track of time
- Be fully connected and engaged, feeling the full vibrance and flavor of the experience, being fulfilled and satisfied with the outcome
So how?
The first step in learning Flowstate Productivity is understanding and building an awareness of how you’re actually spending your energy. If you had a battery but only 20% of it was being used to power your electronic and 80% of it was being wasted by some software glitch or faulty component. You would think that’s terribly inefficient and want to figure out how to reclaim that 80%. The power source would never be running at full capacity, never getting maximum output, draining too quickly and frequently. What if our stress and anxiety is doing the same thing, stealing energy we could be using for focus, attention and effort? Everyone is different of course, but in my unquantifiable, subjective experience, it’s felt like 70-80% of my energy was being used to manage and try to keep my stress and anxiety at bay so that I could complete my work or activity. And since utilizing this concept, building an awareness of the anxiety and stress that was zapping my energy and then developing an action plan to reclaim it, it feels like my output has multiplied 10x – in a combination of increasing the output quality, decreasing transition times, and doing more and better work in less time.
One of the biggest aids in helping me build this awareness is a Flowstate Journal. I developed this journal to help me ground the things I was working on. Why was what I was working on so difficult? What was distracting me, what was I preoccupied with? Was I thinking of or hearing how people would respond to my work? I realized while doing this journal, there were two tracks running in my head while doing my work, one track was trying to focus and do the work, the other track was trying to manage and control whatever stress triggers were playing. This was the first awareness in learning how to silence that second track. And maybe you can imagine how much energy, focus, intention and presence I was able to reach being able to reclaim the wasted energy into the first track of doing the actual work.
I’ve created a Productivity Journal and good news because you’re getting this newsletter, it’s free for you to use. The Flowstate Journal was created in Notion a free, easy yet powerful and widely used app that allows you to create and manage your own productivity workspace. Enjoy and happy Flowstate Journaling!