Unlocking Flow-How to Experience Joyful Productivity in Your Daily Work
Imagine a time when you were so engrossed in a task that time stopped.
Whether it was passionately playing a guitar, writing a captivating story, solving a word puzzle, or engaging in a thrilling sport.
You stopped caring about anything else at that moment. You were experiencing the joyful bliss of being a human — Flow.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, known as the ‘Father of Flow’, presented eight conditions for experiencing Flow in his book ‘Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience’.
I have simplified them for you.
Here’s what you have to do
A. Choose tasks that create Flow
B. Ensure the conditions to sustain Flow
C. Enjoy the blissful joy of Flow
Here’s a breakdown.
A. Choose tasks that create Flow
1. Set Clear goals
2. Create scope for immediate feedback
3. Balance challenge and skill (just the right difficulty level)
B. Ensure the conditions to sustain Flow
1. Increase your focus
2. Create a sense of control
3. Have intrinsic motivation (doing something for the sheer joy of it)
C. Enjoy the blissful joy of Flow
1. Loss of self-consciousness
2. Time distortion
How can you apply these steps to enjoy Flow at work daily?
A. Choose tasks that create Flow
1. Set Clear goals
Having clear and specific long-term goals provides direction and strategy in the workplace.
However, immediate feedback is not possible with long-term goals, so it’s important to have short-term goals that tie in with the long-term ones.
Hence, the annual goals should have building blocks as daily, weekly, or monthly goals.
2. Create scope for immediate feedback
Feedback to aid Flow state need not only come from your manager.
Three types of non-manager feedback are:
- Visible measurable outputs due to the efforts you put
- Feedback from colleagues
- Your judgment of task done well immediately based on your experience
3. Balance challenge and skill
This is the most important and difficult step in a work setting as you don’t always get to choose your work.
For Flow to kick in, the task should be neither too easy nor too difficult, but just challenging enough to keep you fully engaged.
To create Flow, identify the difficulty level of projects. If required, break down into smaller chunks and assign the level of challenge to each.
For hard tasks, set aside additional time for any spillover. Ask for help or clarity if it’s way above your difficulty level.
For simple tasks, delegate or automate if possible. Otherwise, complete them by batching the tasks in a specific time block, preferably in your low energy states.
I prefer to block morning time to create my Flow state, because that’s my highest energy zone in the day.
B. Ensure the conditions to sustain Flow
1. Increase focus
- Block your calendar
- Let people know in advance if you still anticipate distraction
- Use noise-cancellation headphones wherever possible
- Avoid multitasking
- Ensure adequate sleep, nutrition and exercise
- Know your high energy periods during the day
2. Create a sense of control
Control depends on the culture and the context. You can always create micro-goals within any team project where you own the task fully.
If you feel stifled, communicate with your manager to give more freedom to finish a task to get to the desired output.
If a feeling of lack of control continues for a long time, it may be time for a change.
3. Have intrinsic motivation
You should find the activity enjoyable for its own sake, without relying solely on external rewards or motivations. Even if you don’t like your job, you can find some activities with intrinsic motivation to experience Flow.
The first step to identify them is your self-awareness.
Know your own sources of intrinsic motivation.
For instance, for me, mastery is the most important need, closely followed by freedom.
Within mastery, my forte is working with excel sheets and structuring a complex project for the team. In this way, it becomes easier for me to know my Flow activities.
C. Enjoy the blissful joy of Flow
1. Loss of self-consciousness
In Flow, your mental chatter stops, ego vanishes, you stop caring about the world.
It’s a wonderful feeling.
In our professional lives, we often find ourselves preoccupied with thoughts of what our bosses and colleagues think about us.
We strive constantly to impress others with our work. However, when we enter a state of Flow, these concerns fade away.
2. Time distortion
You lose track of time. Hours pass as if minutes passed.
To account for the uncertainty of completion time, it is helpful to build buffers and allow flexibility in project timelines.
Prioritizing tasks and managing time effectively can help create a sense of Flow and minimize time-related stress.
In short, Flow is a wonderful way to live life. It is also one of the major drivers of happiness, according to research. Everyone, regardless of background, can experience this blissful state..
Come on, now give it a shot.
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