Building the flow muscle

One of the more challenging aspects of running a solo business is finding the discipline to get yourself into a focused state to do the work that really drives your business forward. It is easy to get distracted doing too much watching: checking your website's traffic constantly, looking at your social media engagement, checking your MRR over and over again even though you know it hasn't changed.

Ignoring these distractions and getting into the flow to do important work throughout the day is the number one thing that I can look back over time and say, this is what really moved the needle for my business. Like most things that have to do with ourselves, I believe this is a muscle that can be trained over time.

Over the 2.5 years that I've been running my solo business, I can get myself into the flow pretty quickly for more technical work, like when I'm coding new features for my products. However, other tasks that also require focus are more challenging, like writing marketing content. I do see though, that building the discipline to be focused in one area can be translated to other places. For example, since I know I can get into the flow when I'm coding, that helps me to be more disciplined in avoiding distractions when I start writing. In other words, since I can do it while coding, I have no excuse to procrastinate when I'm writing.

I've also put this daily writing habit in place to remove some of the limitations from my writing and make it more free flowing and fun. (when I say limitations I mean writing for specific SEO keywords or optimizing content for social media platforms) Without these guardrails, I find that the words really flow and I don't feel the need to distract myself. This ends up being a nice little workout for my "flow muscle", where I get 30 minutes of intense focus on writing. I've found that this then helps my other writing come easier even if it isn't quite as enjoyable.