Hello beautiful people of Expansive Capacity! Hello beautiful people!

It’s time for more Superpower Sunday goodness! 🙂

This is all about how we can implement wee changes that can turbocharge our *existing* superpowers so that we don’t dim our own lights due to inertia, stress, or any other upper-limit problem that reveals itself along our path.

This month’s Superpower Sunday is about scheduling 90-minute states of flow across 100-day runs.

Y’all know from my 12-part masterclass on Flow Theory in The SMFA Dojo that I’m all about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Steven Kotler and all things FLOW.

Kickstarting states of flow in our lives helps us get more done in a more efficient way, allows us to tap into creativity unburdened by the inner critic, and creates a more abundant life for us overall. Oh, and it’s also superfun!

Whether you call it “being in the zone” or executing “peak performance” or getting a visit from that beautiful muse, it’s the best juju when it comes to our overall ability to build WHAT we want HOW we want WHEN we want. It’s awesome.

Clearly, I love 100-day challenges. (Heck, I created a life-changing course out of one!) While some productivity gurus do 90-day runs, I find that non-stop year-long start-up to be unkind to the system. I mean really… four 90-day runs a year… with FIVE days off? Eff that! It’s three 100-day runs a year… with 9 glorious weeks of recalibration, rejuvenation, REST. Yes. This is correct.

Within my 100-day span, I create a few large benchmark goals. If I’m writing a book those 100 days, I have the research/outlining stage, the writing stage, and the editing stage. These are not equally spread across the 100 days. And I don’t stress about NOT being in a mood to write when there’s still research to do. Nor do I go back and do more research once I’ve changed gears to write. And I definitely write nothing new when it’s time to edit. I am very good about my boundaries for the compartmentalization of my segments!

I know from my brilliant Aligned Hustle Calendar that my best days for churning out content are going to occur during specific phases of the moon and along specific numerological configurations. I don’t freak out about not feeling up for editing during Pisces moon on a 7 day. I take that energy, swirl it around in the bathtub (with a decadent LUSH product of some sort), and then come up with some marketing angle I’ve never before considered. I don’t execute. I just dream it all up!

If Mercury’s going into retrograde during my 100 days, I make sure to get my ish together before that happens and I devote most of that period to revisiting elements of my 100-day project, not charging forward or initiating things at all!

And as for the daily flow states, 90 minutes is the sweet spot. As you know from our visit with Charlie Gilkey in this month’s Expansive Capacity course page, 60 minutes will also do… 120 for some. But less than 60 minutes and you’re context switching/multitasking which is no bueno. More than 120 minutes and you’re stringing flow states together in a way that is not sustainable. The quality of your work diminishes significantly no matter WHAT kind of creative tear you think you’re on.

I actually have reminders set in my phone to get me OUT of my chair, OFF my booty, and moving around so that I don’t pull a day-long desk trip. That’s not kind to my body, my mind, or my spirit… so the little reminders to just move around allow me to reset my states of flow, listen to some Abraham-Hicks, refill my ice water, kiss the hubs, and otherwise do healthy things that should be a part of my well-balanced day.

When you track patterns about what times of day you’re at your most productive state, you can stack your schedule in really lovely ways. I know I burn the midnight oil beautifully. It is RARE that I write a BonBlast during daylight hours. I’ve trained myself to do my livestream broadcasts during best-natural-light hours but never before noon. I like my workouts early but find it’s challenging to get into desk-head afterwards so I like to schedule little admin details for post-Pilates or I hop on a team Zoom to talk through projects with others. We try to keep our meetings to 90 minutes… the amount of work it takes to wrap our brains around some of the nuance involved in the more complex operations of our business is just way too great after that… so why slog through it when we can be done with the meeting and on into a new state of flow for another type of task?

How do I know all of this (and a ton more) about myself when it comes to TIME?

Welp, I’m a pattern-tracking mo-fo. And you can be too. Just start logging your time! Do it just like we did with expectations last month! Pay attention to when you feel most motivated to write your screenplay, when you’re super excited to collaborate with your accountability buddies, and when you’re feeling more like a sloth about all things. And no, you don’t always feel the same way about the same sorts of things. So just start tracking. In a month or two, you’ll have so much clarity about not only how the moons make you feel about getting things done but also about all that juicy numerology, about what times of day have what kinds of effect on you, and about where your sweet spot is when it comes to time blocking… that you’ll begin scheduling things in a way more flow-hacked way!

Don’t be impatient with this data-gathering process! In two months’ time, you’ll have data that will revolutionize how you put together the rest of your year (if not many years to come).

The biggest time-saver in all of this? You’ll never again beat yourself up for being lazy, being less-productive than you were the day before, or being too unfocused to knock out some of the deeper tasks on your list. Because you’ll simply be leaning into exactly what the patterns have taught you about how you best operate! Um… that’s all energy you get BACK in the form of hours every day (and OMG does it help with the enoughness you’re rockin’, when you no longer beat yourself up about this stuff) and, my dear friend, *this* is how we begin to CREATE time.

Boom.

All right, rockstars, get out your August Aligned Hustle Calendar at the Welcome page and get to mapping out that greatness that’s within you. It’s time to really make a difference with all of this.

I’m so damn proud of the work you’re putting in! 🙂

All my love,

Enoughness is an inside job… and sometimes you need a guide to find your way there. Let Bonnie Gillespie get you started.