I don’t see enough people talking about positive channel switching.
We’ve all experienced negative channel switching.
It’s when you’re constantly pushed and pulled in different directions throughout the day that you can never settle in and focus.
One minute you’re responding to an email, then your responding to someone in Slack, then you’re pulled into an impromptu meeting, then your stomach is growling, bathroom break, another Slack message, dive into a report…
At the end of the day, you’re exhausted, you’ve worked hard, you’ve been busy, there’s a seemingly never-ending mountain of tasks and never enough time to do them all…
Peter Drucker talks about this.
He says: “To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.”
I discovered positive channel switching as a novelist.
I would deep dive into the mind of one of my characters and enter a sort of flow state. I thought like them, I talked like them, I knew how they would respond in each scene.
👉 I define positive channel switching as a combination of time-blocking and flow state. It’s about getting into a certain mindset before you take the plunge into the task.
Honing this skill has been incredibly valuable to me in marketing – putting myself in the shoes of my audience to figure out what messaging and creative would resonate with them.
Tuning Into the Right Channel
The best approach for me to get in the right mindset is to consume some sort of media – advertisement, design, podcast, movie, music…
I allow it to seep in until I absorb the characteristics of that media. If I want funny copy, I consume funny advertisements. If I want thoughtful content, I listen to thought leaders, etc.
Using this approach, I switch my mind to that channel or frequency. Once my mind is in this state, I can get to work and be much more effective.
The alternative is to just jump into an task with whatever brain you show up with and try to do what you can to get the job done.
This is where your mind meanders, loses focus, gets blocked, and produces subpar work.
Let me know in the comments what helps you get into the zone to produce your best work?
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