Rethinking Flow in the Age of AI

From Focus to Orchestration

Most advice on productivity assumes that your best work happens when you focus on one thing and block out everything else. That is only half true. While deep focus on single tasks is an extremely important skill to acquire, a lot of my highest-leverage outcomes materialize in less structured situations. They emerge accidentally in a session that starts in one place and ends somewhere completely different.

Over time, I have learned to distinguish between two kinds of flow. One is structured, narrow, and deliberate. The other is messy, exploratory, and hard to justify on a to do list.

I call the first deep flow. I call the second chaotic flow.

Deep flow builds the foundation. Chaotic flow is where the unexpected opportunities come from.

In a deep flow session, I might rebuild a website or create the cash flow forecast for my startup. In chaotic flow, I start reading a blog article, end up tweeting about an idea I had and then discover a person online that I should chat with and ultimately end up requesting an intro to them.

Now, some AI Agents have gotten so good that they make a third flow state possible. And it is structurally different than the other two. I call it Agentic Flow.

Coding is a useful example. Two years ago, coding meant working through

one problem at a time, sequentially, trying to stay in deep flow for as long as possible.

Today, I often work on several problems in parallel. I might ask an agent to fix a bug, another to build a feature, and a third to research the right API. While each agent works independently, I move between them, review outputs, adjust direction, and keep everything aligned toward a single higher-level goal.

This is not multitasking. It is parallel execution. The focus shifts from doing the work to directing it. It is inherently different than deep flow where I focus on one thing at a time and chaotic flow, where the sequence is unplanned.

In a world where AI agents can independently complete work over a longer timeframe, our ability to instruct, manage and coordinate the different agents will become paramount. The individuals who will be able to leverage that, will increase their output by an order of magnitude. The bottleneck is no longer how fast you can execute, but how well you can direct parallel work without losing coherence. Flow is no longer just about focus. It is about orchestration.