Unfortunately, there's no good solution to this problem. I recently had a company ask me to work on a 2-day project for them (in the office), for which I performed sub-optimally.

There are some other variables which might be involved (I was working with a new language, database & framework), but I never really found a "flow". Reflecting upon it, I think the pressure to create a product + learn the tools in a given timeframe threw me off.