How is my flow?
I’ve been reading Drive by Daniel Pink recently, and the author describes something called flow, the mental state when the challenge before us is so exquisitely matched to our abilities that we lose our sense of time and forget ourselves in a function. Some call this being “in the zone” and if you’ve ever been there, you know what it is.
One of the suggestions the author gives is to set up a way to randomly test your flow. The idea is to set up some kind of random message to yourself to record your level of flow and what you are doing – so you can study the data later. The randomness is supposed to give you a real look at different situations throughout your week.
My first thought was to use if this then that for this. I decided how I would to the recording part right away. I use texts and/or emails to ifttt.com all the time for appending data to a Google spreadsheet, so that part was a no brainer for me. I set it up so that any text to ifttt.com with #flow in it would record the other info into a sheet.
The only part I needed to sort out was a reminder to do it randomly. I assumed I could set up a random message using the Date/Time trigger, but I was disappointed to learn that you can’t random as a time trigger.
So I asked Google what to do and learned someone else had set up something almost exactly like I wanted. It was actually a little more than I needed because he set up a database etc for recording info, but I used his idea to build my solution.
I’ve posted the details over here.
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