Rian Doris - The Power of 'Flow State'

Feb '23 in Other

As many of you may know, Rian Doris is the new owner of Consulting.com.

Personally, I had never heard of Rian before he was announced as the new owner. Out of curiosity, I looked him up on Youtube - and what I found was very interesting.

I've linked his TedX talk where talks about productivity, and how maximizing it is actually a counter-intuitive process. I highly recommend watching it.

Paraphrasing it, he talks about how he used to work 15 hour+ days, trying to be as productive as possible, but still never feeling like he was getting enough done. Waking up at 4:30AM, and going to sleep at midnight - yet still feeling like his day wasn't productive enough.

He decided to put down his laptop for a rare break, and went to a conference where an expert was brought in to discuss productivity. Rian asked the speaker how he could take it to the next level - what was the missing key?

The speaker told him that he had it all wrong. People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are thousands of times more productive than any of us, but they have the same 24 hours in the day that we all have. So it can't be about the amount of hours we worked.

It's about how productive you are with your time - not how busy you are for the whole day.

So Rian left the conference, and ran an experiment where he capped his daily and weekly hours of work. He could only work 7 hours a day now, for 5 days a week. 35 hours a week of total work, and 2 days of rest.

He found that after a few weeks, there were some interesting changes. The speed of his work increased - he was able to accomplish more in less time, because he knew at the end of day he had a hard stop.

He became more strategic in what he worked on, because he had less time. He was also forced to confront that he cannot do it all himself, so he became better at delegating work, and deferring work by using prioritization.

But what he also discovered is something called 'Flow State', which we all have experienced. It's that state where we are completely absorbed in our work, and time flows by quickly. His ability to get into that zone increased.

So his advice is to put a limit on your work, and watch your productivity increase. As I mentioned, watch the video I linked to hear him discuss it because it's very interesting.

After watching this video, I watched a few more of his interviews to learn more about 'Flow State'. From my understanding, a big part of it is blocking off all distractions for a set period of time, and being very intentional about what you sit down to do with your time.

So that means setting clear goals, eliminating all distractions, focusing on the present moment, and challenging yourself to leave your comfort zone.

I'm sure many of us knows exactly what he means by Flow State - and it's a glorious state.

But I also know that my life is full of busy-work and distractions. I want to run an experiment where I close all the doors to distractions, and see if I can enter the 'Flow' more often to become more productive.

I've installed a free app called 'Cold Turkey Blocker', which I can set to block any apps and websites on my laptop for set times of the day, or completely for the whole day. I could even make my entire computer not usable for certain times of the day - and I would be able to do NOTHING about it until the settings expire.

The idea is that I won't have access to email, social media, or basically any kinds of distractions outside of dedicated work for those set times. So I set a schedule of blocks, and my computer - which is normally a pandoras box of distractions - is now completely limited in options.

What do you all think? It sounds terrifying to me, because I work like a madman at all hours and days of the week. But maybe there is something on the other side of that fear - and I need to take a chance if I want to reach it.

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