Time for Everything: Letting Go to Find Flow

Filed Under Analysis, Perfect Virtual Manager, Productivity, Successful Blog, Trends | 26 Comments

A Time for Everything

To everything there is a season,
A time to drive, a time to eat,
A time to type, a time to hear,
A time to connect, a time to reflect,
A time for phones, a time for elevators.
To everything, there is a season — paraphrased from Ecclesiastes 3

A few days ago, Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users wrote about a product called Twitter.

For those of you who don’t know about Twitter, it has one purpose in life–to be (in its own words)–A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? And people answer it. And answer it. And answer it. Over and over and over again, every moment of every hour, people type in a word, fragment, or sentence about what they’re doing right then. (Let’s overlook the fact that there can be only one true answer to the question: “I’m typing to tell twitter what I’m doing right now… which is typing to tell twitter what I’m doing right now.” Or something else that makes my head hurt.)

Click the title to see the product page

twitter

Why would anyone want to do that?

Twitter also a tool for

  • Social Networking System
  • Chatroom
  • Microblogging
  • Multiplexer
  • Group Communicator
  • RSS Feed
  • Salon
  • Meme
  • MLM

For me, that makes it worse. I had seen Twitter, and frankly I hoped that it would just go away. I see it as one of the weird worm holes of an overly plugged-in culture that I’m trying fiercely to avoid.

Kathy Sierra makes fun of twitter for the same reason that I avoided it. We both see it as one more way to fragment our attention in a world that already does a great job of doing so.

Finding focus is impossible when we live in a state of constant interruption. Call me cold and unfeeling, but I don’t care about some stranger’s cat named Fluffy — and it irritates me when that stranger makes a call in an elevator to find out about Fluffy, invading my space, my thoughts, making me virtually invisible — practically screaming that I don’t exist. Exactly how rude is that?

I’m all about finding Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“>Flow.
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Flow: Zen and the Art of Having Fun Writing

Filed Under Business Book, Great Finds, Outside the Box, Productivity, Successful Blog, Writing | 11 Comments

Flow

Finding Ideas Outside of the Box logo 2

I want to tell you about one of my heroes. His name is Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high-ee). He became a cult figure in the creative world when he published a book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. The book came out in 1990 and writers, artists, others who need to be creative still tell others about it.

Everyone experiences flow. We call it being “in the zone.” What you might not know is why and how it happens or that you can make it happen more often. Read more

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