I loved this piece from Rands in Repose. If you’re familiar with his writing, he often talks about flow and how to get into the zone in order to achieve it.
The Zone is a place, and Flow is an activity that occurs within this precious mental place. Flow is the ability to consider a project or a problem deeply. In Flow, you can keep a superhuman amount of context in your head and can traverse that context with ease. With Flow, you can produce extraordinary value.
In this article, he describes anti-flow:
Anti-Flow is shower thoughts. They are the random connections your brain makes on a problem, a thought, or an opportunity when you aren’t thinking about that problem, thought or opportunity.
He goes on to describe how he works on problems or articles during his cycling sessions. This is a concept I refer to often as working with our hands or doing physical activity.
What I loved about this article was his tip for how to remember the ideas that come to mind:
As an idea shows up and I deem it worth further investigation, (Yes, there are truly dumb ideas that show up that I briefly consider and then dump) I remember the one word that encompasses the idea and start making a memorable sentence. The sentence from a recent ride was, “Larry stats offsite in London.” Gibberish, right? Two of those words were absolute gold.
I’m taking that idea to heart.
