
There’s something surreal and sweet about a productive, last one out of the office on a Friday, catching a later train than usual, walking to the store for milk while the suns going down kind of day.
I like the kind of Fridays you can walk away from knowing you’ve done a lot, there’s still much to do, and you feel capable of it all or at least excited to figure it out along the way.
Work update
Part of my week was building onboarding material for future recruits coming onto the team. I’ve been thinking back on what I needed when I first started, what questions I had, what gave me the most anxiety—along with scouring the web for templates and useful checklists.
It’s near impossible to eliminate all of the uncertainty and nerves when starting a new position, but I believe it’s important to try and create a smooth process.
These new team members are going to be so freaking onboarded and prepared–they have no idea!
Personal update
It was a good week. The weather decided to ease up on the sweltering heat a couple of times, and I feel blessed.
A quick rundown of some highlights:
1) A childhood friend of mine and an A+ influencer recently moved to New York, and I am so stoked to meet up with her tomorrow and catch up! Check out Dakota’s deeply aesthetic Insta page and YouTube channel if you’re curious. I’m so glad to have another familiar face in the state, even if it’s a few trains away. Us Washington girls gotta stick together!
2) I’ve officially started building the natural/cruelty-free/organic personal care routine of my dreams! I’m open to any suggestions if there’s a brand you love and trust that’s clean beauty.
I’ve been working on making the shift for a few years, but this is the year I have the means to do it properly, and I’m so excited.
3) I’m building a Flow playlist on Spotify (here, if you’re curious) and realizing how much it helps my day when I take the time to buckle down into deep work at least once daily.
A “Workflow” is defined by Google as an “orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information.”
A “State of Flow” is defined as “the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”
And I think those sum it up pretty well. When you get laser-focused on a task for however long, it makes it that much more satisfying when it’s completed all in one block. It can be tricky to mesh the two definitions to be sure, but when you find it, it’s magical.
I’m a guilty task hopper when it comes to the daily grind, I admit it. I’ll bounce around from writing to answering emails, working on a completely separate project, researching a feature in Adobe, answering support tickets, and back again. It can get dizzying if I’m not intentional with how much time is needed for each task and separate them into workflows.
Of course, there’s going to be overlap—that’s the way of things when you’re working across 3 or more departments. But it’s a great help to square away even a half-hour of purely focused work.
What do you do to get into a state of flow? Is that something you try to obtain? I hope to hear from you.
Thank you for reading!