 Hi, this is George Cao, and I'm here walking my little dog buddy, and in this short video I want to talk with you about how we can more purposefully and productively relate to our time. And I've noticed that there are three conscious modes of living on a day-to-day basis. And by the way, I'm in such a beautiful park, so I'll just kind of pan around slowly as I talk through the three modes of conscious living. The first mode is flow. You may have heard of this idea of the flow state. The flow state is when you are feeling engaged in a productive activity, a productive or contributive activity. It usually involves the sense of almost losing track of time or losing yourself in the thing that you're doing. So you may achieve a flow state at work with some of your activities there, or even at home. So when you might be doing some of the chores that are important for you to do, and you feel productive and contributive, and you can be in a mindset of just noticing that activity and doing it as well as you can, and hopefully also bringing some gratitude that you can be doing that. So that's the flow state. And high performers, whether it's athletes or musicians or successful business people, they try to achieve the flow state as often as possible. And I invite you to consider what activities in your work and in your life help you get into that flow state, and to do more of that. So that's the first mode of conscious living. And I'm going to give you some tools towards the end of this video about how to actually apply this. So flow is the first state. The second state is recovery. And I should really say quality recovery activities. Recovery is when you have been working hard, you've been in the flow state, and you know you need to practice some self-care to recover your energy, to re-energize, to renew yourself. Now, there are recovery activities that are not good for you, like maybe going out drinking with friends, maybe you overdo it, or maybe binging on Netflix and overdoing that. But so there are recovery or eating junk food, right? So the recovery activities are not good for you, but I really invite you to think about what are the quality recovery activities. So one example is when I come out and walk in nature and take my dog Buddy out, that's a quality recovery activity. Another quality recovery activity for me is, and this one is really short, is doing an energy reboot. I did a video specifically about how I do that, so I'll link to that in the notes of this video. Okay, now the third state, which is maybe the most important of all, is mindful transitions between flow and recovery, and recovery back to flow. Because if you don't, if you aren't aware of your transitions between those two states, it can get easily into doing unhealthy recovery activities, or from recovery you may stay too long there and given to inertia, and therefore you're not being conscious of the transition back to, and I was trying to show my dog Buddy running back, but anyway, not a great cameraman holding with one hand here. If you're not conscious between flow and recovery, you'll go into unhealthy recovery. If you're not conscious between the transition between recovery and flow, you'll tend to stay too long in recovery and waste time and let inertia stop you from getting back into flow in a timely way. So this is why mindful transitions is probably the most important, to be aware of when you're in a transition mode, going from, okay, I need to stop my flow right now because I've done enough, go into healthy recovery, and okay, I've been in recovery long enough, get back into healthy flow, okay? So let me give you two tools to end this video to help you do this and apply this knowledge. The first tool is to write down what are your activities in flow, what are your activities for healthy and high quality recovery, or self-care, some people call that, and third is what is a good or what are your best activities for mindful transitions? What are you going to do when you transition? So for example, I do my energy reboot. You might just simply close your eyes and take a few deep breaths and envision what's coming up next. What are, what, how are you going to do recovery or how are you going to go back and flow? So, so write down what are your activities for flow, for recovery, and for transition, okay? That's the first tool in the homework assignment that I want to give you. And feel free to comment below if you want to share some of those things that you've written down. The second tool I want to give you is time awareness. Time awareness is to be aware that you are what mode you're in basically. So there's two little tools you can use for time awareness. One is a timer and one is a stopwatch, okay? A timer counts down so you set a time for example 15 minutes. The next 15 minutes I'm going to be in recovery mode and I'm going to do this. And then when you do that, you're more conscious that, okay, I'm in recovery mode right now, I still have 10 minutes left, so I'm not going to overdo it. And then when the timer goes off, then you kind of wakes you up from recovery and gets you back into the next thing that you're going to do. And the second and same thing with flow, you could let's say set a timer for 25 minutes. So I'm going to go into flow in the next 25 minutes or try to work on this productive activity, okay? So the timer is counting down. A stopwatch is counting up and that helps you to kind of log your time. I use an app on the iPhone and it's also on the Android called a time logger. It helps me to log my time. What am I doing right now? I don't use it all year long, but I do use it several times a year for like a week or two at a time to recalibrate my time awareness. So I'm aware of what I'm doing. So for example, I have a time log running right now. I'm walking my dog and doing some thinking, okay? So that's my recovery mode right now. So I hope that this is helpful and I invite you any kind of comments or questions you have. I always welcome them. And until the next video, I wish you flow states, I wish you healthy recovery and mindful transitions.