It’s the moment on the treadmill after you’ve hit the start button, placed the towel over the timer, and take off running. It’s the moment when you’ve gathered your research materials, flipped open your book, and let your eyes run across the page. It’s the moment you’ve sat down, powered on your laptop, and let your fingers tickle the keyboard. It’s that moment. You’re immersed, captivated, spellbound. You’re at “flow.”

What is flow and what does it mean to be at flow?

Flow is a mindset where you are fully immersed and able to focus your energy on a single-minded idea or experience. It’s a mental state that requires your undivided attention. “When [you are] in a flow state, [you are] working to master the activity at hand,” says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, world’s leading researcher on positive psychology. Having the aptitude to concentrate and channel your thoughts and emotions into actively learning, doing, and performing, is a positive and gratifying experience derived from flow. Whether you are singing, dancing, reading, working, you can reach flow once you have consciously determined that you are able and willing to focus on nothing but the task at hand.

How do you know you’re in flow?

When you are in a state of flow, you experience deep and utter enjoyment. You are engrossed with the subject matter and completely involved physically and mentally. You undergo “total involvement with life” as Csikszentmihalyi would describe.

It’s the optimal experience between anxiety and boredom that you’d like to achieve for a period of time.

An afterthought to flow is usually in the form of a question, “Gee, where has the time gone?” Before you know it, you’ve just finished your last mile on the treadmill, thumbed through two or three chapters of your textbook, and wrote a page and a half on your article. It’s that feeling of accomplishment and gratification, and the ability to work your way through those goals and objectives that bring you to the state of flow.

How can you help yourself achieve flow?

Plan ahead. While planning is probably one of the most important processes within project management, it is one of the most underutilized within one company to another. And somehow it is often the most consequential when you don’t set the time aside to plan. That said, when you plan to take a class, organize a meeting, audition for a musical, or become a member of a club, you are mentally preparing yourself for flow. You are taking on new challenges, committing yourself to responsibilities, allocating your time for each task, thus setting your mindset and mental energy for flow.

Set goals for yourself. When it comes to setting goals, one of my favorite mantras are, “There’s no better time than now.” Why wait for the beginning of the year to start that weight loss goal or half a year from now to invest in taking a certificate program. Oftentimes, people come up with so many excuses and before you know it, a year from now, you are still contemplating losing weight and taking a class, but realized this was last year’s goal. When you take the time to set a goal for yourself, you make a promise to yourself and then come up with an action plan to achieve that goal. These two steps alone are what enhances your ability to undergo and continue to undergo flow each step of the way until you have reached that goal.

Timebox those goals, ambitions and aspirations. Without setting aside time to achieve your goal, your goal will only be an aspiration. Put some time on the calendar to work towards your goal, if not weekly or bi-weekly, how about monthly? When you timebox your goal, you are more likely to find yourself in flow and gravitate closer to your overall target.

My goal this year was to begin writing articles. I don’t consider myself a writer and thus probably need to work harder and longer than most people. I’m hoping to write at least one article per month and publish it to WordPress. Since writing this article and finding myself in the flow mindset, I ended up writing more articles than I even considered from the start. I’ve written one article this month, two in the previous month, and even three before that. Setting aside a window of time each week has helped me become more knowledgeable in my field, since I now read more and write more. It’s this sense of accomplishment following the state of flow that really brings me pleasure.

Turn off those pesky notifications. Distractions are everywhere, especially since we’re becoming more digitized and mobilized by social media. Did you know 40% of daily media consumption happens on mobile devices, according to Bob Canaway, Ektron VP of Marketing? People no longer need to sit at their computer to get the latest updates from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It’s a matter of being disrupted by that constant beep or the pulsing red light on your phone that drives you to drop what you’re doing and check. “Notifications create a sense of urgency around something that’s not important at all,” according to Joel Gascoigne publisher of “Zero Notifications.” When you check on your mobile app, you’re interrupting your workflow and your ability to be in a state of flow. Gascoigne challenges you to turn off those pesky notifications on your phone. It doesn’t mean you can’t check for updates or status on feeds. It means you can now take ownership and decide when you’d like to check your email, Facebook, and Twitter accounts, instead having others decide for you.

Undergoing flow more often and for a longer period of time is a resolution I’d like to continue to achieve. The combined feeling of creativity, motivation, and inspiration derived from flow enables me to grow as a marketer, develop newfound hobbies such as Zentangle and Amigurumi, tap into my subconscious, and learn more about myself. This notion of flow as it pertains to the journey of undergoing a particular task is a predetermined mindset that I need to mentally prepare myself for and sustain. By discovering new interests and heightening my curiosity, I will be able to obtain flow more readily, more often.

Now that I’ve shared some of my thoughts about flow, I’m curious to learn what your thoughts are about flow. Can you recall the last time you underwent flow? What are some ways you have achieved flow?