Getting into the zone

I went to see Top Gun: Maverick this past weekend and enjoyed it immensely (Kenny Loggins’ Highway to the Danger Zone is still stuck in my head). It took me back to the 80’s and reminded me of some other high-octane fighter jet stories from that era including Firefox, a novel by Craig Thomas (also a movie starring Clint Eastwood), and Day of the Cheetah, a novel by Dale Brown about a jet named DreamStar. Both Firefox and DreamStar were futuristic thought-controlled military jets (a fun part of the Firefox movie was when the American pilot who hijacked the plane from the USSR realized he needed to think in Russian to launch a missile).

In Day of the Cheetah, author Dale Brown goes into detail about DreamStar’s thought-controlled system, which picked up the pilot’s brain waves. But what I found interesting was that once the pilot strapped in, it took about an hour before he was ready to fly the plane. This was because the pilot needed to reach a certain level of relaxation and concentration to produce the right kinds of brain waves to fly the plane. In other words, it took time for the pilot to “get in the zone”.

If you find a similar dynamic when you’re at work, you’re not alone. Perhaps you’re not flying a futuristic jet, but it does take time for your brain to settle into a zone where things click. Probably the most impactful book I’ve read in the past 10 years is Deep Work from Cal Newport who reinforces this idea–that you need extended periods of time to concentrate on meaningful tasks.

How often have you been frustrated with this situation: You have an important document to draft or review and you schedule 30 min in your calendar for it. You dive into the task with gusto but find it hard to concentrate. You read the words but aren’t thinking critically about it. You finally get to a point where things start to click and you’re in the zone—but the 30 minutes pass and you have to dial into that next meeting.

Nicholas Carr explains that your brain must reorient itself to the task at hand. If you go directly from a stressful meeting or responding rapid-fire to emails to working on a project that requires concentration, it takes time for that transition to happen.

As much as you’d like to think otherwise, it takes time for you to get in the zone, or what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called a state of flow.

Seth Godin provides insight on one way to get there: choose to work on fewer projects. Pick the ones that matter and schedule large blocks of time that will allow you to get into the zone.

But if that’s not the right advice for you, fear not. There’s a ton of science behind this, and you can set yourself up for success by learning how to be proactive and reduce the amount of Beta waves your brain produces when doing frenetic work, and increase the Alpha waves that lead to deep work and flow.

Help quiet your brain before digging into that big project and allow yourself to get into the zone. Maybe that’s scheduling time to take a walk around the block or do some meditation and breathing first. And then, once you get started, be kind to yourself if you can’t focus right away. That’s ok.

Give yourself the time to get in the zone—and not the danger zone kind!

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Books referenced in this edition:

• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
• The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin

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Read. Learn. Share.?is Curated Curiosity?. I regularly share quotes with brief commentary on LinkedIn from things I read, watch, and learn. This series takes us on a journey that goes deeper on top-of-mind topics and themes.