Flow state is the most over-marketed lie in the modern workplace. Everyone wants to talk about ‘getting in the zone’ or ‘finding their flow,’ like they’re some kind of jazz musician or an Olympic surfer. But you aren’t surfing. You’re probably staring at a CRM or trying to figure out why a spreadsheet formula is returning a #REF error. For most of us, flow is a unicorn—it’s a beautiful idea that almost never shows up when you actually need to get things done.
I’ve spent the last three years obsessing over how to actually get work done without wanting to throw my laptop out a window. I work a regular job. I have a boss, a mortgage, and a Slack notification sound that triggers a mild fight-or-flight response. I’ve read all the books, from Newport to Csikszentmihalyi (I still have to Google how to spell his name every single time), and I’ve come to a very specific, probably annoying conclusion: Deep work and flow state are not the same thing, and if you’re waiting for flow to hit before you start working, you’re never going to finish anything.
Deep work is a choice. Flow is an accident.
The “Flow State” obsession is mostly a coping mechanism
We love the idea of flow because it sounds effortless. The definition of flow is that the challenge matches your skill level, time disappears, and you feel great. It’s basically a drug trip without the expensive tabs. But here is the problem: most high-performance work is inherently uncomfortable. It’s not ‘fun’ to write a 40-page technical manual or to debug a legacy codebase that looks like it was written by a caffeinated toddler.
If you wait for the ‘effortless’ feeling of flow to strike, you’re basically just procrastinating under a fancy name. I see people at my office all the time saying they ‘just aren’t in the flow today.’ What they mean is they don’t want to do the hard stuff. I know people will disagree with this, and they’ll point to some study about surgeons or rock climbers, but for the average person sitting in a Herman Miller chair? Flow is a luxury. Deep work is the utility bill you have to pay every month. It’s gritty. It’s friction-heavy. It’s manual labor for the brain.
I might be wrong about this, but I think the ’90-minute cycle’ that everyone quotes is complete nonsense invented by people who don’t have kids or a real job. In my experience, the first 20 minutes of any deep work session are pure agony. Your brain is screaming for a hit of dopamine from Instagram or a quick check of the news. If you’re waiting for flow, you’ll quit during those 20 minutes. If you’re doing deep work, you just sit there and suffer until it gets easier.
Boredom is the point.
The Tuesday I spent four hours looking at trebuchets
Let me tell you about October 11, 2022. It was a Tuesday. 2:15 PM. I was sitting in my home office in Chicago, and I had a budget report due by EOD. This was the kind of task that requires absolute focus—lots of cross-referencing, weird tax codes, and stakeholders who would scream if a decimal point was off. I told myself I was going to ‘flow’ through it. I put on some lo-fi beats (which are also a scam, by the way), lit a candle, and waited for the magic to happen.
It didn’t. I hit one snag in the data—a missing invoice from a vendor—and instead of just digging through the archive, I decided my brain needed a ‘reset’ to get back into the zone. I opened a tab. Then another. Somehow, I ended up on the Wikipedia page for medieval siege engines. Did you know a trebuchet can fling a 90kg projectile over 300 meters? I spent forty-five minutes learning about counterweights while my budget report sat there, mocking me. I felt like a failure. I wasn’t ‘in the flow,’ so I felt like I couldn’t work. I ended up finishing the report at 11:00 PM, fueled by panic and too much cold pizza.
The mistake wasn’t the distraction; the mistake was believing that work should feel good while I was doing it.
That was the day I realized that flow is a fickle friend. Deep work, on the other hand, is a discipline. It’s the ability to stay in the chair when you’d rather be anywhere else. I’ve started treating it like a gym session. You don’t wait to ‘feel like’ squatting 200 pounds. You just put the bar on your back and move. Anyway, I finished the report, but I felt like garbage for a week. But I digress.
The actual data from my 14-month focus experiment
Because I’m a nerd, I actually tracked my focus sessions for over a year. From January 2023 to March 2024, I logged 342 ‘deep work’ sessions using a simple stopwatch. I didn’t use any of those fancy apps like Notion—I honestly hate Notion. It’s a bloated, slow mess that exists to make people feel like they’re working when they’re just organizing. I refuse to use it. I just used a physical notebook and a timer.
Here is what I found from those 342 sessions:
- Average duration: 52 minutes.
- The ‘Friction Gap’: On average, it took 14 minutes of sitting still before I stopped thinking about my phone.
- The Myth of the Long Haul: Sessions over 112 minutes had a massive drop-off in quality. I’d start making stupid typos or forgetting basic logic.
- Morning vs. Afternoon: My morning sessions (pre-10 AM) were 40% more likely to feel ‘productive’ than anything after lunch, regardless of how much caffeine I had.
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. The data showed that my ‘best’ work didn’t happen when I felt the best. Some of my highest-output days were days where I felt tired, annoyed, and completely out of ‘flow.’ The difference was simply the duration of the deep work blocks. When I forced myself to hit that 50-minute mark without looking at another tab, the work got done. It wasn’t pretty, but it was finished.
I tracked 342 sessions and not one of them felt like the ‘transcendental experience’ the productivity gurus talk about. It just felt like work.
Why I’ve started ignoring 90% of my Slack notifications
Here is my risky take: Slack is the single greatest threat to high performance in the 21st century, and most ‘company cultures’ that pride themselves on responsiveness are actually just cults of distraction. I actively tell my friends to avoid any job that mentions ‘synergy’ or ‘fast-paced environment’ in the job description because it usually means they’ll expect you to be ‘on’ 24/7 while pretending it’s a spiritual experience.
You cannot do deep work if you are checking Slack every six minutes. You just can’t. The ‘context switching’ cost is too high. I’ve started doing something that makes my coworkers hate me: I close the app. Not ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode—I actually quit the application. If something is truly on fire, they have my phone number. Guess how many times someone has called me because of an actual emergency in the last year? Twice. One was a server outage, and the other was a guy who couldn’t find a PDF I’d already sent him.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that being ‘available’ is the same as being ‘valuable.’ It’s a lie. Your value comes from the hard things you produce, not how fast you can type ‘sounds good!’ in a public channel. I know this sounds harsh, and maybe I’m being unfair to the people who genuinely enjoy the social aspect of office chat, but I’m not there to make friends. I’m there to do the work so I can go home and live my actual life.
Total waste of time.
Deep work is a grit test, not a vibe
So, which mental mode actually drives high performance? It’s deep work, every single time. Flow state is a nice bonus when it happens—maybe once or twice a month if you’re lucky—but deep work is the engine. It’s the boring, repetitive, sometimes painful process of focusing on one difficult thing for a sustained period of time.
I used to think I needed the perfect environment to be productive. I thought I needed the right lighting, the right coffee (I’ve actually started thinking coffee ruins deep work because it makes your brain skip like a scratched CD), and the right ‘mindset.’ I was completely wrong. You don’t need a mindset. You need a chair and a lack of options.
If you’re struggling to get things done, stop looking for flow. Stop waiting for the moment where it all feels ‘right.’ It’s probably never going to feel right. It’s going to feel like you’re trying to start a cold diesel engine in a Siberian winter. It’s going to be loud, it’s going to smell bad, and it’s going to take forever to warm up. But once it’s running, it’ll move mountains.
I still don’t know if I’m doing this right. Every morning at 4:00 AM when my alarm goes off so I can get two hours of writing in before the kids wake up, I ask myself if this is actually worth it. I’m tired, my back hurts, and the house is freezing. There is no flow at 4:00 AM. There is only the blinking cursor and the silence. And honestly? That’s usually when I do my best work.
Buy a physical timer. Turn off your Wi-Fi. Sit there until it hurts. That’s the whole trick.
