Flow state is completely overrated.

This will be unpopular with a certain kind of productivity content. But consider the evidence. Leonardo da Vinci was, simultaneously, a painter, sculptor, mathematician, aeronautical inventor, engineer, and debater. At no point was he allocated a single focus zone and a pair of noise-cancelling headphones.

For scientists and technologists – for anyone making a genuine dent in how the world works – continuous thinking is not a peak state to be achieved on good days. It is the baseline condition of the job. The romanticisation of flow state is, I suspect, a luxury of the single-discipline specialist. A person who has one thing to master can afford to enter and exit states. Someone building across multiple verticals, managing multiple teams, answering to multiple stakeholders, cannot queue their cognitive modes.

The leaders I have admired most across thirty years in technology shared a different operating model entirely. They were not in flow. They were in thinking mode and executing mode simultaneously, all of the time.

Context-switching was not a cost – it was the capability. The ability to hold the vision of a decade and the detail of a product specification in the same conversation, without losing altitude on either.

Da Vinci did not schedule deep work sessions. Newton did not set a status to 'do not disturb.' They were simply, continuously, thinking.

Perhaps the better question – more useful than flow – is whether you have built a practice of sustained, curious engagement with hard problems. That is available to everyone, without a special state. On that note, signing off a Thursday :)