How to get into a flow state: 5 ways to get there faster

By Dan Remon · Evidence checked October 2026

Some mornings the work runs. You look up, 2 hours have gone, and the problem you’d been circling for a week is solved.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called that state flow. You can’t switch it on. You can set up the conditions that make it more likely, and protect the time it needs.

These are 5 ways to get into flow faster, what the research does and doesn’t support, and the calendar tool I use to stop focus blocks being booked over.

How do you get into a flow state?

You get into a flow state by setting up its conditions, then protecting them. Choose one task that stretches your skills without swamping them. Define what done looks like for this block, and make sure you can see progress as you work. Remove interruptions before you start. Then give the task an uninterrupted block, starting at 20 minutes and lengthening it as your focus improves, at a time of day when you’re fresh. No method guarantees flow. Researchers treat a match between challenge and skill, clear goals and clear feedback as its preconditions, so those are what you engineer.

What is a flow state?

Flow is a state of deep involvement and absorption that people report when an activity challenges them and they feel able to meet the challenge. Csikszentmihalyi introduced the concept in 1975, and a 2022 scoping review covered 252 studies of flow published between 2000 and 2016.¹

He described up to 9 characteristics of flow, including a balance between challenge and skill, clear goals, unambiguous feedback, concentration on the task, a sense of control, loss of self-consciousness and an altered sense of time. Later researchers split them into preconditions and components. The preconditions are the balance between task demands and your skills, clear goals and clear feedback.¹ The rest describes what flow feels like once you’re in it.

That split is the useful part. You can’t decide to lose track of time. You can decide how hard the task is, what the goal is and how you’ll see progress.

The challenge-skill link has been tested in experiments as well as surveys. In 2 experiments, Keller and Bless manipulated how well task demands matched people’s skills and found the match had a causal effect on the emergence of flow.² Later versions of Csikszentmihalyi’s model add a detail that matters at work: flow occurs when the challenge and your skill are both high and in balance.¹

5 ways to get into flow faster

1. Set the difficulty just beyond your current skill

Pick work that stretches you, then adjust it as you go. If you’re drifting and reaching for your phone, the task is too easy, so add a constraint: a tighter deadline, a higher standard, fewer words. If you’re stalling and rereading the same page, it’s too hard, so cut off a smaller piece you can solve. Curiosity helps here. Treat the hard part as a problem worth solving, and ask what you’d need to find out to move it forward.

2. Define the outcome of this block

‘Work on the strategy’ is not a goal. ‘Outline 3 blog posts by noon’ is. Before you start, write one sentence that says what will exist at the end of the block. When you lose the thread halfway through, that sentence brings you back. Clear goals are one of flow’s preconditions, and a vague target gives you nothing to measure progress against.

3. Make progress visible

Clear feedback is the third precondition. Build it into the task so you never have to stop and ask: a checklist you tick through, a word count, a model whose numbers update, a list of calls with an outcome beside each name.

Then connect the block to the bigger picture at 3 levels: the task in front of you, what it leads to, and why that matters to the business or the people it serves. Studies in the 2022 review found that seeing a task as relevant, important and meaningful was positively associated with flow.¹

4. Remove interruptions before you start

Turn off notifications on your computer and phone, close email and messaging, shut every tab you don’t need and put your headphones on. Do it before the block, because every interruption is a fresh decision you’ll have to win.

Interruptions cost more than the minutes they take. In a lab experiment, 48 people answered work emails while being interrupted every 2 minutes by phone or instant message. They finished the interrupted tasks faster with no drop in quality, but reported more stress, frustration, time pressure and effort, and the difference showed after only 20 minutes.³ You can push through interruptions. You pay for it in stress.

5. Start with a short block and build

Start with 10 or 20 minutes. It’s short enough that you’ll agree to it without excuses, and with practice 20 minutes starts to fly by. Then lengthen the block. I think of it as a time budget: you’re spending your best hours, and spent hours don’t come back.

If you want a ready-made structure, the Pomodoro Technique, created by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s, works in 25-minute intervals with breaks between them. Use the same start ritual every time, the same desk, headphones and playlist, so the ritual itself becomes the cue that a block has begun. Attaching it to something you already do is the idea behind habit stacking.

Protect focus blocks with the Calendar of Kings

None of this works if the block keeps getting booked over. Flow needs time nobody else can take, and that time has to be created before the week fills up.

The Calendar of Kings is the tool I use for it. It decides what ships first, what waits and what gets killed, so the work that matters most gets the protected focus blocks and everything else fits around them. I set it inside the Weekly Compass, a 30-minute plan at the start of the week, before the inbox gets a vote. Both are part of the Stealth OS, and the full weekly rhythm is in a productivity system that survives a bad week.

Set your focus blocks with 4 rules:

1. Book them first. Focus blocks go into the calendar on Monday, before meetings. Name each one after its outcome from way 2, never just ‘focus time’.
2. Put them where you’re fresh. In a diary study of 121 software professionals over 5 working days, feeling recovered in the morning predicted more flow at work that day. Well-recovered people showed a U-shaped pattern of flow across the day, while poorly recovered people saw it fade as the day went on.⁴ It’s observational, so it shows a link rather than a cause. My read: protect sleep before a block day and put the hardest block early. Physiology before strategy. I cover recovery in more depth in stress management for executives.
3. Treat them like a client meeting. If someone asks for that slot, you’re busy.
4. Review them on Friday. In the Friday Debrief, 15 minutes at the end of the week, check which blocks held, what they produced and what broke them. Fix the cause before Monday.

If the block you most need is the one you keep avoiding, start with how to stop procrastinating, which covers how I set the first task of each day.

What the neuroscience of flow does and doesn’t show

You’ll read that flow floods the brain with dopamine or switches off the prefrontal cortex. The evidence is thinner than that. A 2017 review of the neurocognitive research called the neuroscience of flow preliminary, and described the brain-imaging findings for reduced frontal activity, an idea known as hypofrontality, as equivocal.⁵ It found clearer signs of a role for higher-order attention networks, and of reduced activity in brain regions linked to self-referential processing. That fits the loss of self-consciousness in Csikszentmihalyi’s description.

The link with performance is similar. A meta-analysis of 22 studies in sport and computer gaming found a medium-sized relationship between flow and performance (r = 0.31), but the evidence couldn’t establish which causes which, or how.⁶ Flow may lift performance, and performing well may also make flow more likely.

So I don’t chase the feeling. Set the challenge, the goal, the feedback and the protected time, then judge each block by what it produced.

How to start

Pick one piece of work that matters this week and give it a protected block tomorrow morning. Then choose how much support you want.

1. The 1% Scorecard. 8 questions, 2 minutes, free. You get your Compound Index, the system that’s leaking most and the one thing to install first.
2. The Quest. My performance membership, run in 28-day cycles, cancel anytime. The weekly rhythm in this article, the Weekly Compass, the Calendar of Kings and the Friday Debrief, runs inside it.

Related reading: 5 systems for intentional focus and action, Peak performance: the daily practices that work and Productivity coaching for founders: install a system.

FAQ

Sources

1. Peifer, C., Wolters, G., Harmat, L., Heutte, J., Tan, J., Freire, T., Tavares, D., Fonte, C., Andersen, F. O., van den Hout, J., Šimleša, M., Pola, L., Ceja, L., & Triberti, S. (2022). A scoping review of flow research. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 815665. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.815665
2. Keller, J., & Bless, H. (2008). Flow and regulatory compatibility: An experimental approach to the flow model of intrinsic motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(2), 196-209. doi.org/10.1177/0146167207310026
3. Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 107-110. doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357072
4. Debus, M. E., Sonnentag, S., Deutsch, W., & Nussbeck, F. W. (2014). Making flow happen: The effects of being recovered on work-related flow between and within days. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(4), 713-722. doi.org/10.1037/a0035881
5. Harris, D. J., Vine, S. J., & Wilson, M. R. (2017). Neurocognitive mechanisms of the flow state. Progress in Brain Research, 234, 221-243. doi.org/10.1016/bs.pbr.2017.06.012
6. Harris, D. J., Allen, K. L., Vine, S. J., & Wilson, M. R. (2023). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the relationship between flow states and performance. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 16(1), 693-721. doi.org/10.1080/1750984X.2021.1929402

This article is general information, not medical advice.