We’ve all had the experience where we’ve become so completely absorbed in our work that time flies by, the outside world is a million miles away, and our talents flow freely. These episodes can be deeply gratifying, and some of our best work comes out of them. So, what causes this, and more importantly, how can we make it happen more often?

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this state flow, and spent years studying the phenomenon. Flow has also been described as ‘a highly productive state of concentration’ in Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams, and as a ‘Zen-like state of total oneness with the activity and the situation‘ in Wikipedia.

Why Flow Should Matter to You

Peopleware suggests that flow is essential to writing great software. Certainly, nose-to-the-grindstone style of churning out code can produce copious amounts of mediocre results. But to truly let the stroke of genius in, you need to be tapping into the Zen of the matter.

Csikszentmihaly goes even further, arguing that “it is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for an excellent life.” This is a particularly interesting assertion in light of the recent studies that suggest that we aren’t very good at predicting what will make us happy anyway.

Entering this flow state can be a skill, not a fluke.

The Two Ways

There are two complementary ways to increase the frequency of flow in your daily work.

The first is training your ability to concentrate. Attention is key to your experience of life; how much you get out of any activity is directly related to how much attention you pay to it in the moment. For example, you can eat an amazing meal, but if you haven’t noticed the flavors and textures, it will have gone before you remembered to enjoy it. Similarly, if you only half-watch a movie, you will miss the themes, plot twists and character development that make it interesting. In the same way, doing your work while in autopilot blocks out opportunities for novel approaches and elegant solutions to present themselves to you. Genius will only come while you are fully engaged with what you are doing.

Your ability to concentrate can be trained, just as your body can. It is a slow, incremental process, and just like with physical training, the real gains are made through consistency rather than occasional bursts. You can build your powers of concentration using many activities, but it is often helpful to start with one that is unrelated to your day job. This is because the presence of agendas and goals other than simply training your mind can detract from your focus and hinder your progess.

A particularly good concentration-boosting technique is the practice of active meditation. I personally like Acem meditation, because it is non-religious and focuses on the development of the mind, rather than “mood-seeking”, or the pursuit of bliss.

The second way to increase the frequency of flow in your work is to engineer circumstances that allow flow to occur. Csikszentmihaly identified nine components of an experience of flow. Here is a list of them with suggested ways to integrate them into your daily work style, so that you can enter this state more often.

The Nine Components of Flow

1. Clear goals.

To enter the flow state, you need to define a short-term goal. If you’re working on a large multi-session project like a web app, decide your purpose for this single creative session. Be careful not to overqualify your purpose; your purpose should be “an arrow, not a container”. (- Steve Pavlina)

2. A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention.

Concentration is absolutely key, and there are ways to make your workstation less distracting. Make things easier on yourself by removing everything extraneous from your field of attention - close down unnecessary applications, ban yourself from IM, email, and irrelevant sites for the duration of the session. It is easy, as soon as the mind starts to wander or a problem seems too messy to deal with, to switch gears and distract yourself with email or irrelevant tasks. This is exactly the moment when you should remind yourself to engage fully with your stated task. Don’t sabotage yourself!

3. A loss of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.

This is Csikszentmihaly’s bit of Zen - there is no longer a distinction between you and your task. This merging comes gradually, as you learn to let yourself be fully absorbed. One way to leave your self-consciousness out of the equation is to convince yourself that no one will see the results anyway, thereby freeing up that mental energy for the task itself. A bit like dancing as if nobody’s watching, but with keystrokes.

4. Distorted sense of time.

Time is most people’s scarcest resource, so it should be carefully managed. This is one of the main benefits of flow - you get more out of the time you spend in flow, so you have the option of spending less time on your tasks. (Though you may find you enjoy it so much that you do it more often.)

The best way to lose awareness of time is to set apart a period of time specifically allotted to your predefined task, and to block out all distractions and interruptions as much as possible. Peopleware says it takes at least 15 (uninterrupted) minutes to enter a state of flow.

If there is one kickstart system to begin getting a taste of flow, it is The Power of 48 Minutes. Cheesy website, but an effective system. The idea is to work in 48 minute bursts, with 12 minute breaks in between. During the 48 minutes you are fully immersed in one task. If you start to get bored, you can race against the clock. After that burst, you get up, walk around, make a cup of tea, and check your email. Then, after what may seem like a decadently long break, you go back for Round 2.

This system requires a timer so that you don’t need to keep checking the clock. I’m using desktop widget called TimeLeft. It’s a little buggy to configure, but once you’ve got it set up, it’s useful and unintrusive.

5. Direct and immediate feedback; behaviour can be adjusted as needed.

This ties in well with a principle of agile programming - test early and often. In this way you can continually fine tune your work so that you don’t stray too far down the wrong path. Keeping an eye on the output will also give you a steady trickle of rewards, as you see the fruits of your labour.

6. Balance between ability level and challenge.

According to Csikszentmihaly, too high a challenge results in anxiety, whereas too low a challenge results in boredom. You can adjust the level of challenge within most tasks. If something is too easy, find a way too make it more efficient, more elegant, more innovative, or more automated. If a task is too hard, break it up into progressively smaller chunks until you find the right level of challenge.

One interesting side note to this is that perhaps, when we find ourselves arguing over minutae and getting downright pedantic, we should take it as a sign that we should ‘move on’ and add another level of complexity to our work.

7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.

It is worth the time to master your tools; they should enable you, not get in your way. Put in the time to find the right software for the job, to understand the core concepts, to learn the best practices, to mechanize the mundane. This way, when you’re in the flow state, you won’t be interrupted by looking up that shortcut, playing trial and error with something you should really know, or being distracted by a search for something trivial.

8. Intrinsically rewarding action, so there is an effortlessness of action.

Not everyone is lucky enough to pick and choose which projects he works on. Even on a hand-picked project, there will still be parts that one doesn’t enjoy doing. Keep in mind that even if you can’t choose what you do, you still have a degree of freedom in how you do it. Learn to develop and take pleasure in your own style. Enjoy craftsmanship for its own sake.

Also, once you’ve become good at triggering the flow state, the experience of flow will become a reward within itself.

9. Focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself.

As soon as you notice your mind start to wander, use that as a trigger to remind yourself to refocus on your work. Your mind, by nature, needs to be occupied with something. The closer attention you pay to your chosen task, the less energy you’ll need to spend to keep your mind from wandering.

Dealing with external interruptions

This structured, focused, short-burst style of working is different than the free form style most people use by default. Colleagues, partners, and flatmates may naturally assume that a given moment is as good (or bad) as any other to interrupt you.

How you manage people who are likely to interrupt you depends on your relationship to them. If you have an open, casual relationship with the person, then you can mention to them what you’re trying out before you go into a session. If the person interrupting you is somewhat unfamiliar (a colleague from another department, for example), you can point to your timer and ask if you can get back to them in whatever time it says. The timer is great for this; it makes the process look important and formalized. If the person is someone who regularly wants your time, you can better manage this by actively engaging with them in those 12 minute breaks. It’s a good a excuse to get up and walk around, and that person will feel less need to seek you out during your focused sessions.

Visual cues such as headphones and earplugs are useful as well.

It’s as Simple as That

Clarifying your short-term goals, closing out likely distractions, letting go of your expectations of how people will react to your work, setting apart a period of time and letting a timer keep track of it, testing early and often, adjusting tasks to the right level of difficulty, mastering your tools, enjoying craftsmanship for its own sake, and training your mind to wander less. All of these are simple things within themselves, though perhaps a lot to keep track of at once. You can integrate these components into your work style all at once or bit by bit. The end result will be the same: a fuller, more satisfying engagement with your work, yielding higher quality results.