Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life

by Jim Kwik

1. Eliminate Distractions Earlier, we talked about the importance of keeping distractions to a minimum. If you’re going to find yourself in a flow state, eliminating distractions is absolutely essential. It can take you up to 20 minutes to reconnect with what you’re doing after you’ve been distracted from doing it. How are you ever going to get into the flow if you’re constantly rebooting because a text drew away your attention, or because you just wanted to make a quick check of social media before you got back to work? So, put everything else aside and concentrate completely on what you’re doing. 2. Give Yourself Enough Time Make sure you have a block of time set aside to get into flow. It’s commonly believed that, when conditions are right, it takes about 15 minutes to achieve a flow state and that you don’t really hit your peak for closer to 45 minutes. Clearing out only half an hour or so isn’t going to allow you to accomplish much. Plan to set aside at least 90 minutes, and ideally a full two hours. 3. Do Something You Love When we think of flow, we tend to think of people achieving at extremely high levels: the athlete perfecting her game, the musician crafting the ideal guitar solo, the writer quickly putting words down on the page as though taking dictation rather than creating. What’s common among all of these people is that they are doing something that matters to them a great deal. They wouldn’t be satisfied with only being moderately competent, as they aren’t ...