Flow

Call me crazy, but quite often, the hardest part of my day is leaving work. My brain gets started on a train of thought, and it's so incredibly hard to stop. Most of the time, I have to finish a major task before I can feel that the work day is actually over - and then I'll start planning out what I'm going to accomplish the following day!

Today was one of those days, and let me tell you, it rocked. After my meeting with Andrew yesterday, I had a notebook full of ideas to pursue and quite a long to-do list. I started with the simplest task, then flowed into the next, reviewing my data set each time.

Naturally, as I went through the data again, I started noticing things about it. This lead me on a short tangent, then another, until I ended up answering a completely different question than I started with.

I didn't realize until the only other person in the building took off for the night that I had been in a deep state of concentration for several hours. I made some real progress on the data, and when I finally got to a good stopping point, it felt like I had just stood up out of a cloud of smoke.

Uninterrupted work days are great, and it always astounds me how much I can get accomplished when I have no distractions and just let my brain run. I look forward to putting together a nice data analysis!