Think of ‘the zone’ (aka ‘flow’) as a physical place. Picture it, if you will. When in this real, plottable space, you work more strenuously, producing greater value than when you work elsewhere, and yet—the wonder of it!— the effort is somehow less onerous. You do difficult work here. But the wind is at your back, and you feel as if you could go on and on. Your sense of satisfaction at day’s end is as sweet as a plump, ripe peach. The rub of the zone is that like any of the most sought-after locales, it requires a fair bit of travel. That, friends, is what a workday startup ritual is; it’s your journey to the zone.

If you’re not sold on the concept of ‘the zone’—and who could blame you? it’s not a utopia; hard work is still hard in the zone; meetings and budget constraints and moving targets exist there too—know this: Even if you never enter a state of flow at any point in your career, a workday startup ritual is easily worth the effort.

What can a workday startup ritual do for me?

Assuming you work forty hours a week beginning at around twenty years old and continue this pattern until the age of sixty-five, you will spend roughly 93,000 hours of your life working. That’s… a lot. If work is going to take up approximately a third of your lifetime, shouldn’t it be rewarding? Let the influencers talk about following your bliss and the recruiters about compensation; we’re talking about something that’s both less and more, something personal that no supervisor or job coach can give you (though bad management can snuff it out with relative ease). It’s a sense of having used your time well, on the whole. Not perfectly, mind, but worthily. Satisfactorily. Together with other mindful work practices like the shutdown ritual, a workday startup ritual can help you make those 93,000 hours well spent, one eight-hour chunk at a time.

3 benefits of using a workday startup ritual:

Ultimately, the reason to use a startup ritual is to set yourself up for success, whatever that means to you.

How to create a workday startup ritual

A startup ritual is a series of tasks performed at the beginning of every work session in the same order. There’s no one-size-fits-all sequence of activities that’s optimal for everyone; you’ll have to build a startup ritual that works for you. Here’s how:

For best results, bookend your workdays with startup and shutdown rituals.

It’s your day. Own it.

Regardless of where you work or what you do, whether you’re passionate about it or not, by taking a more mindful approach to these daily eight-hour chunks of your life, you increase your chances of deriving genuine satisfaction from them—this is above and beyond salary and benefits. If you’re a knowledge worker, mindful, proactive work habits can help you spend more time in the zone. Whatever your situation, the fact remains: No matter who signs your paychecks, the time you spend working is still your time. A workday startup ritual can help you use it optimally.

Photo by Matt Howard