Recently I started to work on a routine that lets me enter a flow state with the snap of my finger. I'm sure you already experienced a flow state and the intense focus that comes with it. But entering such a state can feel like hit or miss. If we don't know when we'll reach a flow state the next time, it's hard to let go of the tension. The result is that we concentrate with everything until we have a meltdown. The core idea behind the routine I started (the book I got this idea from calls it a performance trigger) is to link it with a situation that favours a flow state. Doing this promotes healthier patters with regards to flow.

The first step in creating a performance trigger is to pick an activity that makes you feel serene. It doesn't matter what this activity is. The example in the book was about someone who picked playing ball with his son. I picked taking a walk. You could just as well pick playing ukulele or taking a bath. As Josh Waitzkin, the author of the book observed, everybody has one or two activities they could use to build a performance trigger. Usually, people dismiss them as "taking a break". I had similar concerns when I picked my activity. When I'm taking a walk, I'm not really focused, but let my mind wander. I gave it a shot nevertheless. Because even if it didn't work, I would have done something inherently enjoyable each day.

The next step is to create a four- or five-step routine around the chosen activity. The routine should be something you already like doing. Following a similar example from the book, I picked this routine:

• eat breakfast

• 10 minutes of meditation

• 10 minutes of yoga

• 10 minutes listening to SOAD

• go outside

This routine took me about 60-90 minutes to complete, depending on how long I spend outside. I did it the first thing in the day, because I know from experience that I am better at building habits when I'm doing it in the morning. But it doesn't matter when you do it, or what you are doing. You might choose to do cartwheels, summersaults, scream into the wind and take a swim before doing your serene activity. A routine like mine might make it easier because it's relatively portable, but if you choose something different, that's perfectly fine.

After doing it for about a month, the routine should be fully internalized. The next step is to transplant it from a prelude to your serene activity to a prelude to work. I'm using it as my pre-writing routine. The idea is that the serenity you feel when doing your activity has been associated with the routine. Doing the routine before your work now helps to feel more serene while working. I even felt this effect before transplanting it.

When I was about 20 days into building the routine, there was a saturday with a particularly rough start. The evening before, me and my flatmates had made pizza, sat in the kitchen, and drank (maybe a bit too much) red wine. I stayed up later than usual, and combined with the alcohol and the greasy food too late in the evening, my sleep that night was extraordinarily poor. When I woke up, I already wanted the day to be over. So instead of getting up, I started to listen to an audio book and ate the leftover pizza in bed. Soon after I had eaten the pizza, I got restless.

The restlessness I felt was something I had never felt before, not like this. This wasn't the first time I slept poorly and decided to stay in bed with an audio book. It's something I do on a semi-regular basis. But never before did I have the desire to interrupt this, to get up and do something. This day, I started my routine and went for my morning walk. As soon as I was midway during the yoga exercise, I felt calm and ready for the day. The fatigue was gone. Of course it may just be a coincidence and that I'm projecting into this. But the restlessness was something so particular, that I think it deserves an explanation. My performance trigger starts with eating breakfast. I believe eating the leftover pizza started the routine for me, and made it impossible to stay in bed.

Once you are doing your routine before work, the next step is to shorten it. There are days when you don't have a full hour before you need to be focused. If you have optimal conditions it's great to take your time and go through an extended routine. But when things are less organized, it's great if you can prepare with a condensed routine. The way to condence your routine is to gradually alter it while making sure to retain the same physiological effect. I'm talking about steps like reducing the time to meditate from ten to eight minutes, or replacing the breakfast with a smoothie. With steps like this Josh Waitzkin even trained himself to be completely prepared after taking a single deep breath.

It's important to make these changes incrementally. Soon after I started to shorten my routine, there was a week where I skipped the breakfast completely due to external factors. With each day, the routine's effect diminished. After a couple of days, the effects were so negligible that I even abandoned it midway. As soon as I reintroduced the breakfast, the routine started to work again.

Before I started to use the performance trigger as a pre-writing routine, there were days on which I woke up tired and unmotivated. On these days, I sat down to write for just ten minutes to do at least something. Often I just wrote for three minutes, only to get distracted by thesaurus, to read something on wikipedia, or to simply sit in front of my notebook waiting for the remaining time to pass. These days are gone. There are still days where I wake up tired and unmotivated, but the performance trigger is the most powerful reset button I have ever encountered. Well, a button that currently takes about 50 minutes to press. But I'm working on that.