⚡️Flow Lever 3: Design Your Task for Clear, Immediate Feedback
Identify What Getting Closer to Your Goal Looks and Feels Like
*This is part of a series on how to design flow experiences to propel your creative work.
An essential component of achieving Flow is setting up clear, immediate feedback mechanisms for your tasks, where each action provides instant feedback on progress.
This instant feedback not only sharpens focus but also informs how close you are to achieving your goal.
Clear, immediate feedback is what creates that feeling of being “automatic” and “in the zone” possible.
Let’s look at an example to better illustrate:
In American Football, the clear goal is to win the game by having the most points when the time runs out.
How does a team know if they are getting closer to this goal?
The game is designed to give clear, immediate feedback to all players involved.
A yard gained or lost is immediate feedback that lets players know where they stand in relation to the ultimate goal.
A field goal, a touchdown, a sack, an interception…essentially any action is clear, immediate feedback.
That’s why Flow is so prevalent in sports — they’re designed so that there is an environment for complete focus on the game, goals and rules are clear and specific, and players get clear, immediate feedback after almost any action that takes place.
🤔 What lessons could you take away from the world of sports that you could apply to your creative or entrepreneurial work?
For me and my music, the clear, immediate feedback I experience might look like this:
- I immediately know if what I play on my guitar sounds good or not (e..g I can tell if it is in the right key, if it creates the vibe I am looking for, if it adds to the overall quality of the song, etc)
- I can clearly see if I am making progress on completing a song based on the actions I take during a music recording or production session.
- There are clear milestones or checkpoints that I go through with each song I write, develop, and finalize that let me know whether I am getting closer to my end goal of a mastered and released song.
✅ Ask Yourself: “Do I know what ‘progress’ and ‘success’ look like?”
Ask yourself these questions before any creative work session:
- How will I know if I am progressing towards my goal?
- How will I know if what I’m doing is successful?
- How will I know if something feels right?
- How will I track or measure my progress? (e.g. word count, % complete, time spent, etc.)
- What smaller checkpoints or milestones might I create?
👇These (and more questions to design your work for more Flow) can all be found in the Find Your Flow Checklist👇
👉Grab your free copy of the Find Your Flow Checklist.
⚡️Use this checklist before any creative work session to significantly increase your chances of getting into Flow.🤘
When you get the free checklist, you’ll also get a free mini-course via email diving deeper into each Flow element.
More About Coach Jeff
In my time spent in my Positive Psychology PhD program studying under the Flow master himself (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), from my own experiences bringing more Flow to my creative endeavors, and from coaching hundreds of clients across every creative domain, I’ve identified 6 specific “levers” that you can use to deliberately design your activities for more Flow.
I share them with you in my free Find Your Flow Checklist.
My name is Jeff Fajans (rhymes with “lions”) and I help creative entrepreneurs bring their biggest ideas to life and reach their next level of creative success.
I have a PhD in Positive Organizational Psychology from Claremont Graduate University, where I studied under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the world-renowned author of Flow. My research focused on how to help people learn, develop, and lead more effectively to better achieve creative goals.
I am also an avid music creator and guitar player. 🤘
Through my 1-on-1 coaching, 30-Day Creative Momentum Challenge community, internationally acclaimed digital courses, and speaking engagements, I’ve helped thousands of people from around the world connect with their purpose, clarify their creative vision, amplify their motivation, and create actionable strategies that make achieving their most meaningful goals inevitable.
These are people who are pursuing big goals like starting or leading a business (and scaling it to higher levels of innovation & growth), writing + filming a feature film (and it winning a Sundance award), building an app or product (and getting accepted into Y Combinator or getting VC funding), writing a book (and hitting the Amazon bestseller list) or even exploring a meaningful side hustle or passion project.
