Increase your marketing productivity through flow state by turning a workday into an opportunity for success. Here you are, working hard to finalize the strategy for a new campaign that’s meant to launch in just a few weeks.

You’re working with a whole team of people from content creators right through to web developers. They’re all setting goals and expectations, ready to be set in motion. This is one of the most important tasks you have to complete for the year, so you sit back and have your coffee.

Then your phone goes off, it’s a message on your workgroup saying that the website popup doesn’t work and the new guy can’t fix it. That’s a problem, right? You call them, trying your best to sort out the problem. Just as you get back to the marketing strategy, your marketing manager asks for a full report on the week’s performance.

That’s how a workday goes, and if this is how yours go, don’t feel alone because it happens to the best of us. In a research Gallup discovered that the minimum time someone spends on one task before being interrupted is three minutes. That’s right, only three!

Being interrupted can be a big price to pay, as it decreases productivity and creates the feeling of always being busy, yet never getting anything done. At the end of the day, you’re drained and your most important task is not done.

The more you do, the more tasks appear, especially for marketers. They’re constantly bound to notifications dealing with social media engagement. They also interface with other departments such as SEO, Copywriters, and design.

They present client meetings, team calls and receive tons of emails a day. But there’s a much better way to go: Flow State.

How To Get More Done With Ease

Being ‘in the zone’ is the state where we feel and perform our best. This is also known as Flow. It’s like being in a conversation with someone and when you look again two hours have passed, but you’re still standing.

Or, you’re in the middle of writing a short email to someone and it suddenly turns into an essay instead of an email. This can be called micro flow and it represents experiences of being one and the sense of self fades away and time slows down or speeds up.

The most important thing is that the task feels effortless and almost simulating. Positive Psychology pioneer Mihály Csíkszentmihályi found the term flow in 1975. It may be experienced while you dance, paint or even work.

Characteristics Of Flow:

The experience of flow can be characterized by the following:

• Concentrating and staying focused on the moment
• Merging actions and awareness together
• Losing self-consciousness
• The sense of having control over a certain activity/action
• When the temporary experience is distorted, it alters the experience of time
• Experiencing the activity/task is extra rewarding. This is also called autotelic experience.

More flow in your work life has many benefits, such as getting more done with less effort and also get better results. Flow can be the cure to busyness.

As A Marketer, How Do You Trigger Flow?

It’s important to understand your flow triggers and also manage your environment, this can help you achieve more.

Create Your To-Do-List The Night Before Work

You need to become very clear about your distractions because flow follows focus. With the rush of notifications and urgent tasks, your mind gets pulled in many different directions in a day.

Get in the habit of setting goals one day prior, and if you know you can get 2-5 important tasks done in a day, make that your starting point. It could be writing an article or sending an important proposal, it doesn’t matter.

When you choose important tasks at night, you’ll be focused first thing in the morning.

Get Your Desk Cleaned Up

The key is to decrease distractions, so that pile of papers you don’t use on your desk, clean up a little. Make space, remove post-it notes and candy bars. Get your space clean and open.

Instead of all that confusing input, you can focus on the task you’re doing and not on that candy wanting to be eaten!