flow

After a particularly insightful morning yoga class and a sense of zen ("new agey-ness" alert, Aunt Shelley), I arrived at the office to a number of good sized fires that required dousing.  My plan for the day had been to go "heads down" on a project plan that desperately needed my attention.  I had learned a lot about my time management, and I was gung-ho about committing the appropriate time to important, non-urgent tasks, like my project plan - which was a pretty ginormous task.

Anyone who knew me in law school knew my love for flow charts.  I love flow charts.  They're like choose your own adventure books, and they made law school make sense for me.  I found that almost everything could be reduced to an "if this, then that" statement.  And I love colored pens.  It was a win-win.  Ever since I took the bar exam, though, I haven't been asked to process anything or make logical sense of concepts or process.  I was asked to find typos.  And I was chastised for beginning sentences with conjunctions.  But no one really needed me figure out how anything should be done.  

Recently, with just a little bit of help from Tim, I realized that my flow charting was quite a handy skill to have and made me pretty dangerous in the project management world.  So that morning, with $30 worth of pens from Office Depot, I was ready to dive head first into project planning. 

Our clients and my team, however, had a different plan for me that day, and it was close to 4 o'clock when I finally had a minute to catch my breath.  Tim and I sat down to discuss the project plan that I had yet to execute on. 

"Do you know what flow is?"  He asked.  Tim always started one of our sessions with 5 minutes of wisdom.  I can honestly say, I've learned more from a handful of Tim's 5-minute wisdom windows than I have learned from any mentor I've had to date.  Anyway, I responded that I understood the concept of flow as it relates to the body (think vinyasa).  He let me explain what I meant and then promptly told me that wasn't what he had meant.  Yet, he did it in a way that didn't make me feel stupid or ashamed (an impressive skill that seasoned attorneys generally do not possess).  He went on to tell me that what he meant by "flow" was a place where you go to "get in the zone." 

Oh!  Well then, where I flow is in the mornings, at my house, sitting on the right side of the couch in the kitchen (yes, I have a couch in the kitchen.  It works, trust me), with a cup of coffee.  "Good," Tim said, "then go there.  Get it done.  Do what you have to do to get into flow."

Wait... you mean I don't have to force myself to work in an environment that's working against me?  You trust me to actually do my work even if I'm not in the office?  You don't even want to see a 6-minute breakdown of my flow-spent morning?  This is incredible.

I'm not in Kansas anymore.