All posts by John Paul Narowski

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.
karmaCRM News and Updates

Groups, Sitewide Search, Help Guides and More

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Our team has been hard at work adding much needed & requested features. There’s a lot to digest here so feel free to contact us if you have any questions! One of the biggest enhancements we’ve added is the ability to have private groups.

Groups & Changes to Permissions

You can now make contacts, companies, deals and tasks private to a group instead of just an individual. This allows you to have separate teams of people who can all see the same private information.
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Other Changes to Permissions
In addition to adding groups, we also changed how making things private works in general. Now if you make a record private, all associated history and tasks will be made private too. If you add a contact to a private company, the contact will be private by default. You can choose to override this if you’d like. If a company is made private, all contacts associated with that company (and their histories) are made private too.
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Help Guides

We have reached the first summit of the documentation mountain by releasing the Contacts and General sections of our help guide. We hope to continually evolve this info based on your questions and needs, so please let us know if you feel the guides are helpful, or what is missing. The “Calendar” section is the next we are working on. Screen shot 2010-09-07 at 10.19.13 PM

Sitewide Search

You can now search all data within your CRM (contacts, companies, deals, tasks, notes and events) using the new sitewide search.

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New Sub-Menu

We added a drop down sub-menu to the navigation bar to make space for upcoming features and sections we are developing for you. You can determine which tabs show up in the primary and secondary menus and which tabs are hidden completely in the settings section.
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If you visit any section in the sub-menu, a tab for the visited section will appear to the left of the sub-menu link. This tab will be swapped out and replaced with other sections from the sub-menu as they are visited. Since there is currently only reports in the sub-menu, there wont be much swapping yet.
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Sticky Filtering

At the request of our users we have added Sticky Filtering to your list views. This means that the filters you use to narrow down your list views will stay, even if you navigate away from the page. The page number you are on will also stick. Activate this at the bottom of your Contacts, Companies, Deals and Tasks lists or in your “My Account” settings.
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Tabbing Through Forms

You can now also tab through the contact and company forms.  This will dramatically cut down on the time it takes to get through all of the different forms.

With intelligent design, shortcuts and input from all of you, we hope to continue to shave seconds, minutes and hours off of your CRM usage.  Let us know how we’re doing!

John Paul Narowski
I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.
http://www.jpnarowski.com
Productivity

Are You Sabotaging Your Productivity?

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There is nothing like the feeling of being in the zone and knocking out a huge project or just decimating that “To Do” list.  True and consistent productivity is that allusive and blissful state of work Nirvana we all strive to attain.

Like the sonic boom from a passing fighter jet, we often don’t know true productivity was achieved until it is already gone.  Consistent productivity is the Holy Grail of the business world, but it can be achieved.  We simply need to train ourselves to avoid those things that squash our efficiency and rob us of the motivation to crank out projects like we’re under sentence of death.

Take a step back from your work environment, your habits and the work itself and target productivity killers like you were a sniper.  Eliminate your targets one by one and when the dust has settled only you and your coveted productivity will remain.  Let’s start by putting together a hit list of two of the biggest productivity killers; multi-tasking and wasting time on small and unimportant tasks.  

Multi-Tasking

Multi-TaskingNo matter whether you are an employee with a single job title, a manager or run your own business we are all forced to wear several hats.  Even the most routine job has several tasks that you must achieve in succession and often overlap.  We have been brainwashed to think that the more things we can do simultaneously, the better workers we are.  

Yet, study after study has shown, and your own personal experience will probably verify, that the more things we try to do at the same time, the less effective we are at the individual tasks.  You’re not going to be giving 100% to either task and your overall results will suffer.  This will end up causing mistakes that you have to go back and fix later.  Not only are you burning time and resources but also productivity goes right out the window.

Focus on one task at a time.  If it’s a large job, break it up into smaller portions so you can feel a sense of accomplishment and devote all of your energy to the task at hand.  

Spending Time on Minor Tasks

This is a classic productivity killer and is just a form of veiled procrastination.  If we are dreading working on a project, we’ll simply do all of the small, uncomplicated and mindless tasks possible to put off the major work.  They may be peripheral to the project or not, but in the long run they aren’t really helping us get to where we’re trying to go.

This is the worse of the productivity assassins because it makes us feel as though we are working and busy.  But there is a big difference between being busy and being productive.  Lay out what needs to be done to complete your work, rank it by importance and tackle the most important first.  After the heavy lifting is done, doing the small things will be a breeze and you won’t have the crushing weight of a deadline bearing down on you.

While the list of your enemies in the fight for productivity is almost endless, if you perform a gangland execution on these two, you’ll be way ahead of the game.  In upcoming posts, we’ll examine other aspects of achieving the kinds of productivity levels that not even Japanese managers dare dream of.  Stay tuned!

John Paul Narowski
I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.
http://www.jpnarowski.com
karmaCRM News and Updates

New Feature – Better, Faster, Stronger Calendar

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We have been hard at work adding much needed features to the calendar. As this is one of the most frequently used features, we wanted to ensure that it can handle your various organizational needs. Click on the links below for more details.

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Table of Contents

We added this TOC to help guide you through our new features.

Recurring Events

Now, you can add recurring events to your calendar! All of the standard formats are supported (Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly). If your calendar is imported from Google, your recurring events will also be imported.
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Events Spanning Multiple Days

Our Calendar now supports multi-day events. If you are on the Month view, your multi-day events will display as such.
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View Your Tasks on the Calendar

The calendar now displays task due dates. Mark tasks as completed simply by checking the box next to the task description. If you do not wish to see tasks on your calendar, click “Tasks” in your calendar items to hide it.
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Day and Week View

Now you can view events in the Day and Week view. You may also choose either of these views as the default in “My Account >> Calendar Settings”
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Easily Share Your Calendars

Sharing Calendars with your entire organization has just become much simpler. Just click the menu of the calendar you want to share. Then click “calendar settings.” In settings, you will find the option Share This Calendar. Please keep in mind that, if your calendar is synced with a Google Calendar, it cannot be shared directly through KarmaCRM. If the above is the case, please access your calendar in Google and share it with the desired party. Once shared, you can have the user import the calendar using their Google Account.
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ICal Feed for Outlook & Other ICal Friendly Software

Each calendar now comes with an ICal feed, allowing you to import your KarmaCRM calendar into Outlook or your preferred Ical friendly software of choice. You cannot apply changes to your events externally. However, everything you see in KarmaCRM will display. Please keep in mind that the URL you are provided with is private. Anyone you share the ICal feed with will be able to access your calendar, so share at your own discretion.
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Customize the Calendar How You Want It

We now offer a number of options for those of you looking to customize your calendar display.

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Default View
Allows you to select the default view after you click the Calendar tab.

Start of Week
Indicate the start of your work week.

Fullscreen Mode
Allows you to view your calendar in fullscreen mode. This is helpful if you have a lot on your calendar and would benefit from the extra space.

Show weekends
If your business does not operate on weekends, you might want to hide them from the calendar to save space. Simply uncheck this box and Saturday and Sunday will no longer show up on your calendar.

Drag and Drop Events to Reschedule

To reschedule events simply click and drag the event to the desired day. If you are in the week or day view you can also change the time if you please.

Better Integration with Google Calendar

We have refined the way KarmaCRM interacts with Google calender to bring you improved synchronization and more reliable data transfer. Now your recurring and all day events will be loaded properly. With this upgrade almost everything you do on Google calendar will be translated to Karma and vice versa. If you use Google Calendar as much as we do, this will be a noticeable improvement.

Cheers,
The KarmaCRM Team

John Paul Narowski
I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.
http://www.jpnarowski.com
Small Business

Start Your Own Business: A Quick Guide to Breaking Free From the Cubicle

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Chess, King, BossThe dependability of a steady paycheck from your job is great, but no matter how much you’re getting paid, you’re still trading in your own hours to make money for someone else. If you want to truly be free and reap the all of the benefits of your work, you should consider starting your own business and be the boss.


Can You Wear the Crown?

They say, “Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” and they weren’t kidding around! When you’re “the man” the buck stops with you; there is no one else to blame if things go south. If you’re up to tackling this challenge, you need to put some serious time into planning out what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it and how to make a business grow.

Despite the challenges it presents, being your own boss is extremely rewarding personally and financially. If you’re ready to dip your toes in the pool of entrepreneurship, then check out this quick guide to make sure you have all your bases covered.

Find Your Niche

The very first question you need to ask yourself is, “What service/goods am I going to offer?” What you decide on should not only be lucrative and have a market but should also interest you. When you work in a field that you truly enjoy, it feels a lot less like work. Make a list of things you are good at and that you really enjoying doing. Go ahead, I’ll wait. 🙂

Take your list and make sure there is a viable market that you can enter. You can do this by Googling the names of the market or terms that are commonly used in it. If paid ads show up in the search engine results, then you know people are making money doing this. You can also check Amazon and your local bookstore for magazines that are devoted to your field of interest. Look at the ads in the magazine and see what people in your market are buying and what they are interested in.

What’s Your Business Model?

The next thing to consider is your business model; how are you going to make money doing what you enjoy? There are a thousand of ways to make a buck, here are just some:

  • Create a website or publication that makes money through advertising.
  • Sell some sort of service.
  • Sell a physical or electronic product.
  • Consult and show others how to become as great as you are at whatever it is you’re great at.
  • Be the middle man in an interaction and take a percentage or fee from one or both parties.
  • Sell other people’s products and make a commission per sale, for example internet affiliate marketing.
  • A mix of the above.

Make it Legit

Unless you want an unpleasant letter from the IRS one day, you need to make your business legitimate. The first thing you should do is create a separate entity like a LLC or Corporation. Research what situation works best for you given your individual situation, your business and where you live. There are tons of resources out there that can help you with this.

Next, make sure you get a Tax ID number from the IRS and pay your taxes when you start making some money. I know this seems like an obvious statement, but you would be amazed at how many people don’t. If you’re working from home, make sure you get a post office box where they will sign for your packages. You can list your home address but you generally want to separate your personal and business activities as much as possible.

Finally, have a business number where people can get a hold of you. Even if your business does not require one-on-one contact (i.e. Internet based), you still need a phone number to enhance your credibility and receive calls.

Cover Your Bases, And Then Round Them

If something is confusing, make sure you talk to a professional. Do-it-yourself services are all the rage these days but don’t risk your financial future or your business’s existence by just winging it. Accountants and lawyers are worth the money they charge and it never hurts to have a professional weigh in on your plans.

Now you are ready to rock! In the next part of this series, I’ll discuss using the Internet, social media and word of mouth advertising to get the customers streaming through your door, website or phone!

John Paul Narowski
I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.
http://www.jpnarowski.com
Productivity

Five Easy Steps to Finding Your Flow, Part Two

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karma_bigger

Welcome back! Earlier this week we posted the first part of a two part series called “Five Easy Steps to Finding your Flow”. The first step was developing or discovering a passion for your work. This is not always easily achieved and many find themselves working for a paycheck only. Find that extra motivation and you’ll find successes arrive much more often.

We now conclude the series with the final four steps…

2. Select the Right Task

If the task that you are working on is too easy, too hard or unimportant you’re never going to find your flow. The job at hand needs to be challenging enough that you use your higher-level skills.  But on the other hand, you want to avoid challenges that bring frustration and interrupt your rhythm. Likewise, you also need to be doing something that is important enough to matter beyond just pushing papers around.

3. Set the Stage

As mentioned before, distractions are one of the biggest “flow killers” out there. You need to clear your workspace of anything that will rob you of complete concentration.  That means you need to silence instant messages, emails and all of those other wonderful devices meant to force us into multitasking hell.

I don’t know about you but I can’t stand the nagging feeling of seeing a new email come in and not being able to at least check on its level of importance. You need to tune all of that out. Work in a quiet room or find something that blocks the world from you while not stealing your distraction.

Sometimes silence isn’t the answer though. Many masters of flow (including yours truly) listen to music while they work, or even play movies that have been seen a million times in the background. I personally find silence deafening, so I need something in the background to keep my mind from wandering. Experiment and find what works best for you.

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4. The Hour Matters

Have you ever noticed you do your best work and are most productive at certain hours of the day? Maybe it’s in the morning before everyone else shows up or late at night when your household has quieted down, but everyone has their optimal work time. This is the fertile soil in which flow grows. Combining an environment with no distractions and working at your own optimal time is a huge stepping-stone to achieving flow.

5. Practice Makes Perfect

Getting your mind to enter a certain state of activity is never easy and even those who play on the field of flow regularly can’t always reproduce it. Like anything else, practice makes perfect; keep on trying to find your optimal levels and tweak your routine where necessary.

Final Thoughts

Most importantly don’t stress about it. If you’re desperately driving for flow then you’ll never get there. It would be like someone putting a gun to your head and trying to force you to relax! Flow happens when you let go, lose yourself in your task and the world around you melts away. Do your best to set the scene and see what works and what doesn’t.

John Paul Narowski
I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.
http://www.jpnarowski.com
Productivity

Five Easy Steps to Finding Your Flow, Part One

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relaxation au crÈpusculeThe application of Zen practices to business and personal life has been getting huge amounts of attention these days, and for good reason. The advantages of simplifying, tuning out the noise, being in the moment completely and finding higher levels of creativity and productivity can have staggering effects on your output.


Zen Life: How Close Are You?

If the ideals behind being Zen just don’t register with you, you’re not alone. Wrapping your mind around Eastern philosophy can be about as easy as doing a Rubic’s Cube blindfolded. Surprising as it might seem, you have taken part in many Zen experiences and have reaped the benefits without really knowing it. One of the most common is the State of Flow.

State of Flow

Have you ever been totally engrossed in a task or activity to the point where you cease to think about every single action, lose track of time and just act? This is the state of mind known as flow and it increases productivity and creativity, reduces stress and allows your conscious mind to take a backseat to the other parts of you. Throughout history many practitioners of Zen Buddhism such as monks, martial artists and samurai warriors have used their meditative abilities to enter this state and achieve almost superhuman feats.

Even if you’re not into decimating opposing armies on the battlefield or breaking iron bars with your head flow can still be easily achieved. Here’s five easy steps to find your little slice of productivity Nirvana:

1. Be Passionate About Your Work

You can’t lose yourself in a job that you absolutely loathe. This kind of task encourages distraction and procrastination, which are the enemies of flow. While we all have to do things we don’t enjoy from time to time, if your job is filled with these, maybe you’re not in the right line of work. I’m not saying you should give your two weeks notice today or take revenge on that vending machine that robbed your Milky Way last week…but maybe it’s time to consider a change.

If that just isn’t the cards for you, then try to do more jobs you do enjoy in your position. Take your examples of higher productivity to your boss and see if you can’t map out a better job description for yourself.

This is the first part of a two part series focused on Finding Your Flow.  Please join us on Friday for the conclusion to the series and the final four steps to finding productivity.

John Paul Narowski
I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.
http://www.jpnarowski.com
Sales and Marketing

What is the Effect of Social Media on the Brain?

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Is the internet making us smarter, or is it becoming a crutch whereby we no longer have to remember information?

What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

That was the subject of a recent book by Nicolas Carr called The Shallows:What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains in which he opines, backed by research, is while the internet has increased the amount of activity in our minds, it is making us lazier in remembering information. The reason for this is the advent of hypertext. Instead of being able to read something in a linear fashion, with the web we are often confronted with a barrage of links. These links lead us to other places, to different browser tabs, and eventually leaves us wondering what exactly we’re spending our time really doing.

Do You Need the Links?

Take some time to perform a little experiment with yourself to prove that your internet browsing is affecting your ability to focus. Pick up a book. (Yes, remember those?) Pick one up, preferably one that interests you, and start reading it. Keep track of how long you can continuously read it for while storing the information on the pages. I tried this myself recently and found that I simply could not read a traditional published work without hypertext for as long as I once could.

It’s this sequence of straightforward, linear information that we once used to be able to absorb like a sponge which is being lost in a hyperlinked, information overloaded world.

Social Media: Productivity Killer

523496_51052131This is especially true when you put this into the context of social media. Productivity experts are renowned for advocating that people only check their email or smartphone at certain times of the day in order to properly manage time. This strategy is effective in controlling message bombardment, but how in the world you can do something like that on Twitter or Facebook?

It’s not possible to manage social media developments by carving time around these activities. In reality the only way social influence can be spread is through the constant flow of tweets, updates and whatnot. The worst part? Most people don’t even realize why they cannot get anything done with their time with their brain activity constantly aflutter trying to keep the social media boat afloat.

Time to Delegate

So what is there that one can do? Delegation. This method is by far the most effective way I’ve seen social media work successfully is by having a specific person take the wheel and manage campaigns. By trying to do everything on Twitter and Facebook you’ll leave your head spun if you’re not careful.

Social media may be bad on the brain if you’ve got other things to get done in your day, so if you plan on making it a part of your business strategy, set yourself clear goals. Having people around you whether they are freelancers, experts or employees who can focus on this task while you are trying to manage your business will also save you a ton of time.

John Paul Narowski
I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.
http://www.jpnarowski.com
Small Business

Starting a Business, Planning for it and Dealing with Change

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As anyone who knows about working for or perhaps starting a small business is the degree of change one must deal with. For some people, change is hard to deal with. On a higher level, when you ponder the road that life takes everyone on this always has to be grappled with, and it becomes very troublesome for people who have problems dealing with change on a consistent basis. When you are launching a new venture or managing a longstanding small business you have to come to terms with the fact that in order to survive you have to go with the flow.

The Business Plan

Those who are rigid in their ways need not apply here. In order to grow a business you have to be able to quickly adapt to ever-changing environments. I always have to laugh when I hear about these entrepreneurship courses that people take in college. What is your first assignment or the capstone project for the class? Create a business plan.

That’s right. You spend your time looking at competitive analysis, market research and capital outlays. In essence, you carefully craft a set of rules and procedures in starting a business. You submit your first draft to your professor, and he or she essentially gives you an opinion on how tough it will be for you to survive. And the professor is probably right.

Can You Really Map Your Way to Success?

1282512_31752498That is in a nutshell what the inherent problem is of going by the book, or along with a rigidly set business plan. That plan is going to fly out the window the first time you make a sale, the first time you lose a customer and the first time you have to let someone go. There isn’t a “plan” that can teach you how to do this kind of stuff; you have to learn as you go. Of course, if you’re a true entrepreneur, that’s how you’d prefer to have things done: on the fly.

But let’s go back to the college course and a perfectly crafted business plan. There’s a method in that madness in doing this for a grade: you need to find out how viable your best idea in business really is. Can you identify an under served market? Are you prepared to spend hours Googling your competition? Can you take the risks to actually implement and back up what you are saying on paper?

Change is Great!

That’s why in the rules and regulations that befit a university classroom, the best measure of if you can start your own business is to create a business plan. And the point here is not to say that having a plan is bad, just make sure you’re not writing out what you expect to do in any kind of stone, because change will surely be constant in your process ahead.

John Paul Narowski
I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.
http://www.jpnarowski.com
Sales and Marketing

Saying Goodbye to Madison Avenue, the Heart of Traditional Media

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mad-menThanks to Mad Men, we all have an intriguing image of what goes on behind the scenes at big advertising firms. Sure, the days of smoking, drinking and flagrant sexual harassment in the office are probably gone but the big budgets, art departments and well crafted pitches still dominate.

Once upon a time, you couldn’t get your message out unless you had a long line of zeros on a check to get you some serious advertising muscle. While this form of advertising has done well for decades and continues to dominate the market, technology is bringing about a revolution. Like all innovative changes, it starts off small but gains momentum and eventually captures the attention of the titans of industry.

E-Marketing Makes a Difference

The internet and more specifically social media is taking the focus off of traditional, large scale advertising campaigns and making everyone from small businesses to multinational corporations stand up and take notice. Social media is based on the concept that all people can have equal access to information and share ideas with one another. This is radically altering the way a lot of people do business and especially how they advertise.

It’s not enough for a company to build an awesome car and put up a bright shiny web page with all the Flash graphics that you could possibly handle. People want to interact and find out more about the car, or any other product for that matter, on a personal level. This is why you now see Twitter campaigns, Facebook fan pages and a variety of other social media services receiving a bunch of attention from corporations and advertisers.

Build A Conversation, Level the Field

People just don’t want to be sold to – they want to take part in something and they want to share. Social media fanatics are willing to share very minute details of their lives on the internet; what they are doing, watching, eating, thinking, and everything else you never knew you didn’t want to know about. So, if someone finds an awesome product or service they like sharing it with their friends. The social media element to it all is just second nature.

Social Success = Business Success

social-media2All of this doesn’t only level the playing field; it drops an missile with multiple nuclear warheads on it! With free social media accounts, a basic web site and the right marketing tactics anyone can create and run a business, selling pretty much anything out there. The days of the “mom and pop” store not being able to compete with the corporate behemoths are fading. Now, it’s the corporations who are worried about the social media influencer running a business from abasement.

Being an owner of several web based businesses, I can personally attest to the power of the internet and social media. With a little hard work and the right know how, you have just as much of a shot as dominating the first page of Google as anyone else. Not only has technology made the world smaller, it’s helping the business world become more accessible to everyone.

No Time Like the Present

If you’re interested in utilizing the Internet and social media to promote or start a business then there is no better time. More people visit Facebook every day than Google; even my VHS tape-watching grandma has a Facebook page! The barriers to entry are low and the potential rewards are staggering.

In the end, there is no magic bullet or secret that will let you sit on a beach somewhere while the internet makes you money hand over fist. It requires hard work, research and perseverance but it can be done. Simply put, social media marketing has radically altered how we all look at business, advertising and the world around us.

John Paul Narowski
I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.
http://www.jpnarowski.com
Karma

Three Conditions Required for the Mental State of Flow

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Theme: teens, education, sport.We’ve all been there before – you find yourself completely engrossed in a task, time melts away and you act on instinct, without consciously thinking. Many martial artists, Buddhist monks, sports stars among others routinely enter this state. Us mere mortals can also slip into this mindset doing everyday things like playing video games, developing software and even writing mega-awesome blog posts like this one (I think).

Flow: Completely Focused Motivation

csikszentmihalyiThis totally absorbing state of being is called flow and was researched and proposed by the Hungarian psychology professor Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. Csíkszentmihályi (shown right) labeled flow as the mental state where you have “completely focused motivation.” While experiencing flow you are so focused on the task at hand that your conscious mind, emotions and everything else going on in your head are all aligned to help complete whatever task you are doing.

My first experience with flow was at a very young age while playing video games. I was on the final level of a game I had been trying to beat for around three weeks and could not quite manage to get it finished. My Dad watched me play for a few minutes and when I had come through an exceptionally difficult part of the game he said, “Wow, how did you do that?”

He was amazed at the blank stare on my face and how fast my little fingers moved across the controller. I realized that during the time that he was watching me, I hadn’t been focusing on my character in the game; I had simply been taking in the entire TV screen. When I really thought about it, I hadn’t been thinking about anything at all. My fingers moved from muscle memory and I was able to break through the barrier that previously had stopped me from beating the game.

Three Conditions for Flow

I now know looking back that this is an example of flow at its finest. So if flow is one of the best ways to get focused and get something done how do we get there? Here are Csíkszentmihályi’s three conditions for flow:

  1. You must be involved in a task that has clear goals. With clear goals set you have structure and direction. I was able to achieve flow when playing video games because I was really trying to beat a level, and the smaller tasks at hand all pushed me into the direction of my end goal. Writing words or code is no different – the logic in your head become keystrokes and appear on the screen because you are trying to express an idea straight from your mind.
  2. There must be a balance between the challenges and tasks at hand. You need to feel as though you capable of doing what is laid out before you but it can’t be so boring that you don’t care. When the task requires a high level of skill, is worth doing in your mind’s eye and is highly challenging you will achieve flow.
  3. There must be immediate feedback on your performance. This can generally come from your own intuition on the level of performance, video games obviously have this built in. Nevertheless, without feedback that you should adjust what you’re doing to the overall skill level of your task, interest may begin to waver. Consistently adjusting to nuances in the task at hand (if this is needed) can help you to stay in the state of flow.

The uses and implications of flow in education, work, sports and many other fields are huge. As anyone who strives to achieve things, it’s vital to understand that flow represents the ultimate level of focus and you should do everything possible to encourage it to do your best work. Elimination of distractions, having clear goals as well as being in a focused environment along with these three conditions above can help you to get more done and at better levels of quality.

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John Paul Narowski
I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.
http://www.jpnarowski.com