Ask HN: How do you get and stay in the "zone"?

There are different modalities to exercise. Many of them are complimentary. All of them hit a rate of diminishing returns in finite time.

What you do (how you train / what your fitness routine is) depends on your goals and needs.

Generally, there are:

• Short-term energy systems training: high-intensity cardio. Characterized by high-intensity intervals, Tabata, fartlek, or similar training protocols. A Tabata workout runs 4 minutes.

• Long-term endurance energy systems training: this can help train the body to more efficiently mobilize fat stores. It's what many people think of as "exercise": long, slow, steady-state activities such as walking, cycling, etc.

• Strength training: high-level resistance training to near failure in the 1-20 reps range, generally. This contains within it additional modalities: strength, hypertrophy, endurance, isolation, compound, plyometrics, speed / Olympic lifts, etc. Also involves progression, periodization, and micro / meso / megacycle training variation.

• Prioreception / fine motor control: not entirely the same thing, but essentially training your coordination and skills. This could be gymnastics moves involving strength and balance, pitching or tennis accuracy, or fine motor control utilized by musicians.

• Mobility work: much of the asana practice of yoga delves into this, but myofascial release (self-induced or received massage), heat and cold therapy, etc., play into this.

• Relaxation, meditation, mindfulness, visualization: different aspects of relaxation, many involving stilling the inner voice. The meditative practice of yoga is an embodiment of this.

• Rest and recovery. Anyone training hard becomes a sleep whore. An eight hour minimum, and often sleep binges of 10-12 hours, aren't uncommon for athletes in serious training.

• Diet. Fueling the engine, specific to your goals, is key. Micro and macronutrients, timing, and caloric content are the major factors.

"Yoga" itself is a multi-form discipline (the eightfold path) of which asanas (poses) are only one component.

Some great tips. But, for me, at least some of becoming productive has to do with not doing a lot of meta-thinking about my work. For instance, the more I think about a start time, how to start, etc., the more likely I am to just keep thinking about it vs doing something.

The same is true for hitting the gym too. If I take time off for whatever reason and say, "I'm going to start again Monday" or similar, then I am less likely to do it. Instead, I have to just get up, put on my workout gear and go. In fact, it's like I have to do it as mindlessly as possible.

There just seems to be something about planning, talking, and thinking about things that keeps me in a passive mode of inaction. I think that mode is decidedly "out of the zone".

Also, along the lines of thinking too much, I read somewhere a while back that we spend too much time thinking about how we feel about things. The question posed was "what does that have to do with anything?", which struck me as very true. Sometimes things just are and we have to deal with it. That includes getting work done. I know that if I whine and complain to myself about not feeling like doing the work, it gives me license to slack off.

So now I try to refrain from putting so much energy into thinking about how I feel and instead redirect that energy to just getting the work done. Not always easy, but a prerequisite for being productive at all, let alone approaching the zone.

-planning the day in advance. Planning between tasks incurs HUGE overhead.

-isolate yourself from distraction

-declare goal in terms of whats-in-it-for-me

-list things to do, write down (.txt / post-it)

-iterate on breaking down

-only do work if you can not break it down further

-measure time

I found the biggest waste is not in working slowly but between blocks of work. Include them in your next task's log. Log time every time you finish a task. Guesstimate time when breaking down a day/task, log time when finished. Improve.

I found being in a flow is different from being extremely productive. Being in a flow only guarantees high concentration. It doesn't verify that you are moving in the right direction. Regularly breaking down tasks and iterating on breaking them down gives you a habit of refocusing.

Your issue with distractions is almost certainly a negative. Sometimes you've simply got to face those head-on. It's very, very difficult to handle both these and creative work. A sense of fatality about whatever's causing the distractions may help -- there's something to be said about Ashleigh Brilliant's "I feel much better now that I've given up hope".

Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow is probably the canonical reference. Read it. He's also appeared in multiple interviews (I encountered him a couple of decades back during a long road trip through the back country, it was a wonderfully serendipitous discovery).

I also listen to numerous interviews with authors, musicians, artists, and similar creative types, including occasionally scientific researchers. I'm finding these to be increasingly interesting with time. The task of getting yourself into a state to allow creativity or problem-solving to emerge is one shared with many others.

As for my own observations:

• Routine helps. Having a regular "beat" to my day provides structure.

• Recognizing my own limits and rhythms is key. As I posted elsewhere in this thread, there are many forms of physical exercise and fitness practices. For many of them, a relatively brief training period (as few as 4 minutes, generally up to an hour or two, rarely more) provides optimal benefits. Rest and recovery are esssential. I'm finding similar patterns in mental tasks: there's only so long I can remain focused.

• Removing distractions and concerns helps greatly. At their best, academic environments are almots coddling in their embrace, and allow freedom from immediate concerns to explore and analyze topics in depth. Many corporate or government research environments similarly remove these concerns. Frank Herbert's Dune includes the litany against fear: "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." I see stress as the mind-killer, and its negative influence on creativity and flow is legion. Mind: short-term pressure can lead to focus, but chronic stress is an absolute disaster.

• Engagement with the problem at hand and belief in the mission helps greatly. Among my frustrations with present tech trends is that much of the work is what David Graeber calls bullshit jobs: http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ I've expressed those frustrations here on HN more than once, and have been working for the past two years on my own response to this. A key problem is that non-bullshit jobs and compensation tend to be inversely correlated. Working for something I don't believe in, however, is ultimately as destructive as chronic stress (and is likely a form of it).

• Creating an environment in which you can work without distractions and which is filled with calming influences helps greatly. I'm fortunate to have a space of my own, a physically comforatale environment (not too hot, not too cold, good lighting, excellent seating), free from interruptions. I've found myself listening almost exclusively to classical music, and avoiding (at least for much of the day) news programming. I avoid virtually all contact with advertising, which I find has a tremendously negative influence.

John Cleese's presentation creativity is another I've found insightful. In particular, he points to the role of humor in creativity: it's the brain's response to surprise (or one of them), and may exist in part to help us be aware of a novel circumstance or phenomenon, one which might prove useful to us. It drops our mental defenses against novelty.

http://fixyt.com/watch?v=AU5x1Ea7NjQ

I won't claim to have licked the problem -- it's a process, not a product. But I've made a great deal of progress in exploring ideas and issues that I'd been wanting to look at for years or decades. And it absolutely makes me all but positive that many trends in business and workplace practices are very highly counterproductive for creatives: open-plan offices, communications overload, business-faddism in general, brainstorming, constant progress reports and evaluation, punitive consequences, lack of opportunity for professional development, treatment of employees as disposable, and badly broken evaluation metrics (themselves a characteristic of trying to assess quality of a complex domain, see Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I've been revisiting.