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The Drop In – Edition 006
Your Flow-State OS for Peak Performance
This Week: How to Know You're Actually in Flow
Where Did the Time Go?
You’ve probably had a moment where you looked up from a project, a conversation, a workout, or a creative burst and thought:
“Wait, how is it already 3pm?”
That right there is one of the most reliable signs of flow state.
It’s called time dilation. A distortion in your perception of time and it signals that your brain has entered a state of deep focus, intrinsic motivation, and reduced self-consciousness.
Whether time slows down (as it often does in sports or live performance) or disappears completely (during deep creative work), this altered sense of time is one of the clearest indicators that you've dropped in.
Time Dilation: The Flow Marker Hiding in Plain Sight
Flow researchers like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Steven Kotler have identified several biomarkers and brainwave shifts when someone enters flow.
These include:
Transient hypofrontality (a quieting of the prefrontal cortex)
Spikes in dopamine, norepinephrine, and anandamide
But unless you're hooked up to a brain scanner, your felt experience is the best real-time feedback you have.
Time dilation is your internal compass.
If time feels faster or slower than usual, your brain is likely in a non-ordinary state of consciousness: you have dropped in.
Self-check questions:
Did you lose track of time?
Was your inner critic quiet?
Were you fully immersed in the task?
Did the work feel both hard and enjoyable?
If you answered yes, chances are you were in flow.
Praxis: The Flow Trigger Tracker
This week, try rating deep work sessions using a simple Flow Trigger Tracker. This will take some intention around deep work and combine some of the methods used in earlier editions.
On Sunday night or early Monday morning, identify one or two things that need your complete attention and that you want to apply some deep work sessions around.
Schedule them on the calendar as ‘Deep Work: Task Name’. (pro-tip: make this public on your work calendar.)
Before the deep work session begins, clear your desk, environment and your mind.
Remove all distractions and notifications. Put your phone in airplane mode, set Slack or Teams to quiet for the allotted time.
Set a timer. Go to work.
Track these 3 categories:
Time Perception (1 = dragged, 5 = disappeared)
Focus Level (1 = easily distracted, 5 = fully locked in)
Enjoyment + Challenge (1 = boring or frustrating, 5 = exciting and just hard enough)
Write anything else down that you noticed during this session. Before your next session, revisit the previous session tracking.
Don’t be frustrated if you don’t drop in to flow the first few sessions. Like any good habit, this takes practice. Don’t look at it as failure. Look at it as training. Think of each session as a rep at the gym. Even if it’s not perfect, every session builds your attention muscle.
Don’t optimize for perfect flow. Optimize for consistent effort. Flow will follow.
This week, I completely lost track of time, building this app on a Sunday afternoon. I started at around 2PM, and the next I knew, it was close to 8PM. Euphoric.
Parting Thought
Flow isn’t just about high performance.
It’s about full presence.
And the easiest way to know you're there?
When time fades away.
— Michael
Founder, The Drop In
& Author of ‘Human Traits — a novel exploring humanity’s relationship with AI’