Friday afternoon, you finally sit down to build the pricing model for the new client, the one you've been putting off all week. You look up and three hours have gone by. You haven't checked your phone, you didn't notice you were hungry, you didn't see the office emptying out. You're tired, but more satisfied than you've felt in weeks. On Saturday night, though, after three episodes in a row on the couch, you feel flat and a bit empty. Wasn't that the rest you'd been waiting for since Monday? What you felt on Friday has a name: a flow state. And understanding when it shows up can change how you experience your work.
Your best moments aren't the restful ones
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the psychologist who spent his life studying what makes people genuinely happy. In his book Flow he reaches a conclusion that goes against what most of us assume.
The best moments in our lives, he writes, are not the passive, relaxing ones. They usually come when the body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. The swimmer trying to beat his own record. The violinist mastering an intricate passage. The child placing the last block on the tallest tower she's ever built.
These moments aren't necessarily pleasant while they're happening: the swimmer's muscles burn, the violinist sweats. But they're the ones we remember. And added up, they give us something the couch never does: a sense of mastery over what we do.
The paradox of work
To find out when people enter this state, Csikszentmihalyi and his team came up with an unusual method. They gave more than a hundred working adults a pager that went off at random moments, eight times a day for a week. Each time it beeped, they wrote down what they were doing, how challenged they felt and how much of their skills they were using.
The results surprised even him. While working, people were in flow 54 percent of the time. In their free time, reading, watching TV, seeing friends, going out to eat, only 18 percent. In fact, more than half of the leisure responses fell into what Csikszentmihalyi calls apathy: low challenge, low skill, a feeling of being passive and dull.
And yet, here's the paradox, nearly everyone said they wished they could work less and have more free time. We chase rest, but it's often in hard work that we feel our best. That doesn't mean rest is useless: it means passive rest, the scrolling and back-to-back episodes, rarely recharges us, as the piece on managing your energy explains.
The three conditions for a flow state
Flow doesn't show up by accident. According to Csikszentmihalyi, it appears when three ingredients are in place.
A clear goal. You know exactly what you're trying to do right now, not in general.
Immediate feedback. You can tell straight away whether it's going well or badly, without waiting until the end.
A balance between challenge and skill. This is the deciding ingredient. Csikszentmihalyi explains it with Alex, a boy learning to play tennis. At first, just getting the ball over the net is enough: the challenge matches his skills, and he enjoys it. After some practice he improves, and hitting it over the net gets boring. Or he meets a stronger opponent, and the gap makes him anxious.
Boredom and anxiety are the two ways out of flow. To get back in, Alex has two options. If he's bored, he needs to raise the challenge, say by playing someone just a little better than him. If he's anxious, he needs to build his skills through practice. It's the same principle as in the piece on goals vs skills: every time you get back into flow, you come out a little more capable than before.
Turning a boring task into a race
The most striking story in the book belongs to Rico Medellin, who works on a factory assembly line. The task he performs on each unit is supposed to take 43 seconds, and he repeats it almost six hundred times a day. Most people would be sick of it within a week. Rico has been doing it for five years and still enjoys it.
The reason is that he approaches his job the way an athlete approaches a race: how can I beat my record? He has studied every move, every tool, the perfect sequence. After five years, his best average for a day is 28 seconds per unit. Often he doesn't even tell his coworkers: it's enough for him to know he can do it. "It's better than anything else," he says. "It's a whole lot better than watching TV."
And knowing he'll soon hit the limit of how much he can improve at that job, he takes evening classes in electronics twice a week, so he can move on to more complex work. He's figured out how flow works: when the challenge runs out, you go looking for a new one.
If Rico can do it on an assembly line, you can do it with a report, an analysis or a backlog of emails.
Your next task, in flow mode
Pick the task on tomorrow's list that weighs on you most, because it bores you or because it makes you anxious.
- Make the goal specific. Not "work on the presentation," but "finish the three slides on the quarterly numbers."
- Find immediate feedback. A time to beat, a checklist to tick off, someone you can show the result to right away.
- If it bores you, raise the challenge. Do it faster, polish a detail you usually skip, try a new approach.
- If it makes you anxious, break it down. Isolate the part you don't know how to do, practice that first, or ask for help with it.
- Protect the time. Notifications off and at least an hour without interruptions: flow doesn't survive a message every five minutes.
Next Friday, when you look up and three hours have gone by, you'll know it wasn't luck.
What's the important thing you'd really like to focus on?
Tell me what it is and we'll build a path to protect it from everyday distractions.