Flow

Life may be like a box of chocolates, but Flow is like a good cup of coffee.

Great post about a concept I’ve talked about before, which is central to some of the types of work I do, and not at all necessary to others. At the old business, it was a mix, where I could be anywhere doing anything and answer quick questions that might come up, put out proverbial fires, but frequently not need a flow state at all. That’s the drive-by stuff, the small stuff.

I’m perhaps more needy of it than some, and may even have a harder time achieving the state than some. It’s how I write the best, or at least the most painlessly productively. It’s how I do certain things that are oddly at both the especially creative and especially analytical ends of the theoretical spectrum that calls those distinctive.

I always need it more for the equivalent of loading a program into my head and wrapping my mind around it. Or more accurately, when there is more to load, or material that is less fresh.

I may as well have been a programmer. If I could scrape by for a while and have a lot of uninterrupted time, (re)learning to be one is high on my list of possibilities.