The Magic of Daily Flow

Living your life in a more relaxed, flowing manner might end up making you more productive and perhaps also happier.

I have written before about my lifelong struggle with self-enforced and acculturated productivity, rabid adherence to goals, and other life hacks for getting things done that have proven to be more problematic than helpful for me.

Along the way, I’ve learned an important lesson. Since I don’t think I’m particularly unique, I have to assume that this lesson might be worthwhile to others who have struggled with the same burden of abiding by the ubiquitous cultural mantra that we’re all supposed to be constantly productive and striving for never-ending goals.

The lesson I’ve learned is I’ve discovered that rather than attempt to shoehorn the activities, tasks, and aspirations of my life into an externally- or self-imposed rigid system, my life functions best and I’m happiest when I simply go with the flow of the day.

I’m sure that sounds a bit unrealistic to some. Perhaps some reading this feel that runs entirely counter to their own sensibilities about how they get things done. Maybe it sounds naïve and awash in new age self-help nonsense. But hear me out.

I’m not going to reiterate too much what my regular readers may have read before, but for those who aren’t aware of my past in which I attempted to be a hyper productive, goal attainment machine, I wrote about it in one of my most popular Musings from a Curious Mind newsletter posts, “Stop Dangling Carrots.”

Confession time. I’m a lifelong goal creation addict. I know. It sounds like goal creation should be a good thing. That’s what I was taught. From my father’s productivity-focused upbringing to my years of formal schooling to the consumption of countless self-help books and workshops, the creation of goals has been deified throughout my life. But what if all of that was misguided from the start?

It’s possible you’ve been exposed to the concept of “flow” popularized by the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Flow in positive psychology, also known colloquially as being in the zone or locked in, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one’s sense of time.

While the concept of flow is typically applied to moments in our lives of intense focus when we are doing something in which we’re so completely immersed that only the thing in front of us is within our immediate awareness, I contend there is something similar I call “daily flow.” At least that’s what I choose to call it. I doubt the idea is entirely new, but after doing a few online searches I didn’t find other instances in which daily flow is used how I mean it.

I alluded to my own daily flow mindset when I wrote “Living Intuitively”and “More On Living Intuitively.”

So, at present, my own process is to live a life mostly driven by intuition. However, I take those intuitive decisions and check them against what solid information I have at my disposal whether I learned that information in a book or simply by metaphorically repeatedly banging my head unsuccessfully against the same brick wall.

This has created a nice balance in my life. Maybe it will for you too. Listen to your intuitive insights. Use them to help you make decisions. Use them to assist you in crafting a life path for yourself. But don’t ignore actual data that might better hone your intuitively derived decisions. Strike this balance and you’ll likely be better poised to succeed in life, whatever success means to you.

Intuition is akin to what I now call daily flow. It’s leveraging the tacit knowledge we all have within us to move through life in a non-rigid but meaningful way, making tiny decisions and course adjustments along the way rather than sticking to a specific hard and fast plan.

Does this mean I don’t have my own approach to moving through life without entirely relying on randomness? No. I do have an approach.

For example, much of what I do in life I can categorize under the umbrella of self-improvement. When I wrote about my own approach in “The Self-Improvement Strategy That Works For Me,” I outlined my simple process that doesn’t impede the natural flow of my day.

First, I stick to my habit of capturing ideas, dates, contact information, quotes, books to read, articles to read, goals, plans, insights, and whatever else floats through my brain in the moment. I consider this one of my superpowers. I’m constantly tapping out notes on my phone or laptop. If only a paper and pen is available, I use that and then later transfer it to my digital notes app. I’m a digital sort of guy. But if paper and pen work better for you, go for it. I don’t think it really matters much how you prefer to capture notes as long as you do. Do what works.

Second, every morning and every night I sit with myself and mull over my life. Yes, my entire life. At one point I called this meditation, but the heavy lift of constantly attaining a meditative state has proven to be problematic for me. My daily walks are the closest I get to a meditative mindset Plus, the goal of meditation is often to clear the mind and what I want to do as it pertains to self-improvement and goals is fill it up.

I randomly fill my mind with the sum total of my desires, obligations, passions, and so on to construct an imagined future but more importantly insights for the day. In the morning, I try to put together what I think my day ahead will entail with the full realization it could all fall apart in an instant because that’s the reality of the world we live in. In the evening, I reflect back on the day, assess the successes and failures, ask myself what I want to do better, and then think about how I might apply that to tomorrow. I’ve done it for so long, at this point each morning and evening session only takes about 10 minutes.

But all that said, I’ve found that waking up in the morning with as few expectations for my day as possible tends to create the most happiness in the moment-to-moment playing out of my day.

What’s been fascinating to reflect upon is that I’ve been “more” productive than I used to be after adopting the daily flow mindset. By eschewing the rigidity of absolute goals, time-bound work periods, and never-changing processes, my life seems to unfold in a way that still has me doing lots of cool, important, fulfilling, and meaningful things but with far less stress than when I was trying to maximize and optimize every moment of my day.

If asked for a definition of daily flow, this is what it would be.

Daily flow is living one’s life so that each moment naturally flows into the next guided primarily by our tacit knowledge and intuition in the moment and secondarily by any specific goals.

I’m sure some people don’t want to readily adopt a daily flow mindset. I’ve never assumed there are one-size-fits-all approaches to life. Unique people require unique strategies. But since this daily flow way of thinking works for me, I assume it might work for others. Maybe it will for you.

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