It takes some effort but you can trigger the zone. I put on my favorite programming song (looped). Turn on “Freedom” to block the web. Exit every unnecessary app. Then finally do meditative breathing. Usually within 10 minutes I’ll be in the zone. The only caveat is that it is much harder for me to get into this state if I’m debugging.
I've found I sometimes just need to do something to get there.
I just had what I consider to be the single most productive day in the past few months, and I started it feeling like I wasn't going to get anything done. But I decided to golf a regex in our codebase and I had that feeling of motivation and jumped right into actual work.
But funnily enough I find debugging to be the most fun when I'm in the zone (assuming I know the codebase). Something about being able to get really deep into a problem and having all the tools and programs and hardware open and running and all setup correctly.
