Anne Truitt Zelenka

You’ve probably experienced flow: that sense of effortless engagement in what you’re doing. Maybe you get it when you’re coding or designing or writing or painting. Time and self disappears, channeled into the world making itself real.

Flow guru Csikszentmihalyi suggests you are likely to get into flow when:

• You are engaged actively with the world. Surfing the web in order to write a blog post is more likely to get you into flow than surfing the web for no reason.
• You are stretched just a little bit beyond your current skills. Writing a blog post that’s a bit better put together than usual — making it scannable, or giving it a better headline, or putting in screen captures for once — will be more engaging than writing just like you always have.
• You have clear goals. “I intend to publish a blog post before I start dinner” is better than “hmm, maybe I should write a blog post.”
• You get immediate feedback. You actually publish your blog post instead of just writing it and leaving it in draft form, thinking you’ll finish it off some other time.

You can try to arrange your activities so that they fit these requirements. Then maybe you will find flow more often. But not every activity you do can be made flowful. For example, try turning baby care into a flow-inducing activity — and if you do, tell me how you did it.

On the other hand, don’t. I’m happy to be three years beyond babies (my third and last child is now four years old).

If you do have a baby of some sort or another, what do you do? How do you get and stay engaged? My book has become like a baby, squalling all the time and needing diaper changes (revisions) or bottles (new chapters).

My baby even wakes me up in the middle of the night crying with hunger for better ideas and better structure. I’m bleary-eyed and worthless the next day when I need to be taking care of it again! I don’t have postpartum depression. I have post book contract depression.

It’s in these flow-deficient times that you need mindfulness instead. Mindfulness is about present moment engagement when you don’t have the prerequisites for flow. Instead, force attention to the present moment.