Bonus: Books That Make You Think - Stolen Focus Part 3: Do you have enough time for flow?

Books That Make You Think - Stolen Focus Part 3: Do you have enough time for flow?Welcome to this week's Books That Make You Think. I'm still talking about Johann Hari's Stolen Focus, but his is actually our last weekly session thinking about Johann Hari's Stolen Focus.  This week, I'm particularly thinking about the chapter that he wrote on the crippling of our flow state. Flow state is something that I became aware of in my undergraduate study, and I've actually thought about a lot for myself, because I find that my ability to hyperfocus on a task and pay exclusive attention to that one thing that I'm doing is probably my superpower in running my business. And I talked a bit about that on the podcast episode About my Brain and Entrepreneurship. But what was really interesting in Johann Hari's book, is he talks about the fact that in our lives today, we have much less opportunity to experience pure flow state. And that's because in order to achieve that feeling of flow, where you're 100% focused on that one thing, and time kind of evaporates around you, you don't notice the passage of time because you're so focused, you need to be mono tasking, and that's not something that we're allowed to do very often in our society at the moment. So it's really interesting from both a clinical and a business perspective, I think, because there's a lot of evidence that if you don't experience enough flow state in your life, you never feel like you master anything, you never get that feeling of achievement and pride in something that you have completed. And we know from models like CBT, and ACT, and most clinical models, particularly for working with depression, people who are struggling with low mood, they all involve helping people to experience more mastery in their life, or to do more of the things that matter to them. And actually, if they've not got opportunity for flow states, then they're unlikely to be able to do that, or to get much satisfaction out of it when they do attempt to do that. So I think that's really important from a clinical perspective. But there's also this kind of productivity element to it as well, if you're not allowing yourself to experience flow state, how are you going to do your best work? And how are you going to get the reward that you need in order to feel motivated to continue to work on a big project like a book, or even a blog campaign, for example, if you're not allowing yourself long periods of time to immerse in that project. And I find this really interesting, because when I talk to my coaching clients, who are psychologists and therapists trying to build their businesses, often when they're feeling a bit negative, and we look at what they've done over the last week, they've done lots of little tasks on little bitty projects and they've not allowed themselves any time to really dive into a project that interests them and excites them. And I think we all recognise that feeling of feeling fragmented and stretched thin, and like we're not really doing any deep work. So I thought it'd be helpful for us to think about what we need in order to achieve flow state, so we can think about how to get more of that into our lives and the lives of our clients too.So Johann Hari uses Mihaly's definition of flow state. And his definition says that you need three things to be in place in order to achieve flow state.Firstly you need to be mono tasking. You can't achieve flow state if...