flow getting into the zone at work 26101

8/9/2019 Flow Getting Into the Zone at Work 26101

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Finding Flow:

Get into the Zone at Work

Janette GirodThatVoodooYouDo.com

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Flow is something that weve all experienced at one point or another. It gets us out of bed early in the morning sothat we can get a few quiet hours in at the ofce. It sometimes keeps us there late, after every one has gone. Andit keeps us glued to video games or out jogging on the street.

Most of us call it getting into the Zone. The psychologist Mihaly Cz- coined the term flow. Flow has also been

called a highly productive state of concentration. Cz found flow so compelling that he dedicated his life tostudying and deconstructing the experience.


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So, whats so great about flow? Being in the flow state while doing your work produces vastly better results thanwhen you do your tasks on autopilot. You get things done more quickly, and its a very gratifying experience inand of itself.

Now, none of this would matter if going into flow was just a nice fluke that happened every so often. But in fact,you can learn to control it. You can harness its power to get better work done faster.

--------------------There are two main aspects of learning to harness flow.


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The first aspect is your attention. Attention is key to your experience of life. What you get out of an experience isproportional to the amount of attention you pay it.

For example, you could have an amazing meal sitting in front of you, but if you are too distracted to notice thetextures and flavors while youre eating it, it will be gone before you remembered to enjoy it. So that amazing

meal becomes a mediocre, forgettable one.

Similarly, if you only half-watch a movie, you miss the themes, plot twists, and character development that makeit interesting. And so a compelling movie becomes a dull one in your experience, when you remove your attentionfrom the equation.

In the same way, doing your work using only part of your attention blocks out opportunities for discovering novelapproaches as well as elegant solutions.

Fortunately, your attention can be trained, just as your body can. But its important to remember that progress isincremental, just as physical training is, and the real gains come through consistency rather than throughoccasional bursts.


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The second aspect of learning to harness flow is to engineer circumstances that allow your mind to go into theflow state. This aspect emphasizes making it easy on yourself, and not sabotaging the process of going into flow.

Since a large part of the flow state depends on engaging your full attention, screen out distractions as much aspossible. While you cant necessarily screen out your colleagues, you can close down IM, your email client, your

rss feeder. You may still need to browse the web, but be careful to stick to relevant pages, and not let yourself gofrom site, to site, to site, suddenly realizing 15 minutes later than youve gone on an irrelevant tangent. It isextremely easy to go down the online rabbit hole these days, but it is also one of the biggest modern barriers toflow.

Cz identified nine components that characterize the flow state. Youre probably already familiar with some ofthem and you might already do them. Finding ways to integrate all of these components into the way we work willhelp with this process of engineering situations where flow comes easily.


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The first thing that characterizes flow is the presence of clear goals. Its having a good idea of what youreshooting for.

Its important for these goals to not be too abstract or long-term. I dont mean the sort of goal where you decideyoure going to build the worlds greatest social web app. It needs to be at a scale that is achievable one session.

You sit down, decide what youre going to do, and by the end of the session, youve done it.

If youre working on a website, it may be cracking just the one UI problem. If youre a writer, it would be writingjust a few pages, or one article. The important thing is that you have a clear idea what you want to achieve, andthat you know it is achievable. You dont need to know exactly how youre going to do it; you just need to knowroughly what it is and how youll know when you get there.


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Another characteristic that Cz noticed was part of the flow state is a high degree of concentration on a limitedfield of attention.

We have so many interesting things available to us while were sitting at our computers these days. In fact, half ofthe apps weve seen this week exist to suck in our attention. While this makes having a desk job way more fun

then it used to be, it also tempts us to spread out our attention very thinly between IM, email, twitter, flickr,reddit, digg...and on and on.

As much as we like to think of ourselves as multi-taskers, the truth is we can only really concentrate on one thingat a time, and multi-tasking for humans is really just switching very quickly between tasks. There is a costassociated with each instance of switching tasks, and its usually our work that pays the price.

The good news is, its easy to turn many of these things o! They are virtual, and so they can be gone with a

click. Web sites are a bit trickier to screen out if the web is big part of your job, so you may just need to banyourself from certain sites while youre in a flow session.


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The third component of flow is a loss of self-consciousness. Getting out of your head and into your task.

One way to move toward this way of working is to stop viewing your work as an extension of your self-image.Instead, start thinking of it as a collection of ideas whose edges you are trying to find and carve out; you are actingas a conduit to bring these ideas into a concrete reality. This helps get your ego out of your work.


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Time is most peoples scarcest resource, so it should be carefully managed. This is one of the main benefits of flow - you get more out of thetime you spend in flow, so you have the option of spending less time on your tasks.

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 alldistractions and interruptions as much as possible. The book Peopleware found that it takes at least 15 (uninterrupted) minutes to enter a

state of flow. You may find that the first 15 minutes are the most difficult to stay focussed, and then you hit your stride.

If there is one kickstart system to begin getting a taste of flow, it is The Power of 48 Minutes. The idea is to work in 48 minute bursts, with 12minute 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.This has an added safety net. If youre finding the task tortuous, youll at least know you only have to do it for X more minutes. Youllprobably be surprised at first at just how much you can accomplish in a 48 minute session, when you are fully immersed.

After that burst, you get up, walk around, make a cup of coffee, check your email, catch up with your colleagues. Then, after what may seemlike a decadently long break, you go back, refreshed, for the next round.

This system requires a timer so that you dont need to keep checking the clock. You could use an egg timer, or a desktop widget. Im usingdesktop widget called TimeLeft. Its a little buggy to configure, but once you ve got it set up, its useful and unintrusive. If you know of a betterone, please let me know.


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Cz reckons that what makes most games fun is the fact that you can continually experiment and try out new strategies as you see what works andwhat doesnt. Its also what makes any kind of driving or riding fast that demands constant fine-tuning of your course so enjoyable.

So how can we bring this immediacy of feedback into our work?

Web 2.0 is all about early releases, alphas and betas, and short, iterative cycles, where you send your product out into the wild early, so that you

can see how it is actually used, and then fine-tune it accordingly, usually several times. While this way of working can seem a bit chaotic at first, itis also more eective, because you get a constant stream of very useful feedback, which you can incorporate into your product to make it far bettersuited to your audience than if you had just tried to guess what they wanted.

There was an interesting study done a few years ago where they divided a pottery class into two groups. The first group was told it would begraded on the number of pots it produced over the course of the term. The second group was told it would be graded on the single best pot theyproduced in that term. So essentially, the first group was being graded on quantity, and the second on quality. The results of this study werequite interesting. It turned out the first group, who had the most tries, without being hung up on perfection, actually turned out the higher qualitypots by the end of the term.

With web-based products, focussing on getting something built and out there and then fine-tuning it can result in a higher-quality end product

than fixating on getting it perfect the first time. You wont know how you need to adjust your behavior until you get that feedback.


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We cant always choose our tasks, and even when we do, there are usually parts of it that wed rather skip. Evenin the best job, there will still be some amount of drudgery as well as some tasks that really stretch, and, frankly,intimidate us.

Luckily, you can adjust the level of challenge within most tasks. If something is too easy or mind-numbing, find a

way to make it more efcient, more elegant, more innovative, more automated.

If a task is too hard, find a way to break it down into increasingly smaller chunks until you find the right level ofchallenge. Or deconstruct the way someone else has solved a similar problem.


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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 youve gotten into the flow state, you wont have to interrupt yourself by looking up that shortcut, playing trialand error with something you should really know, or being distracted by a search for something trivial.


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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 you dont enjoy doing. Keep in mind that even if you cant choose what you do, you still have a degree of freedom in

how you do it. Learn to develop and refine your own style. Enjoy craftsmanship for its own sake.

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


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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 youll need

to spend to keep your mind from wandering.


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This structured, focused, short-burst style of working is different than the free form style most people use by default.

Colleagues, partners, and roommates 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 youre 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. Its 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. And if you really cant bear to shut down IM, then at least

change your status to busy.


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So, those are the 9 components, and suggestions for how to integrate them into the way you work. None of themare difcult within themselves, and each can be added to your routine individually. But even though the system isrelatively simple, the pay o is substantial. Youll produce better quality work, in the same or less time, and youllenjoy the process more.

If you want to read more about flow, its worth checking out...


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Photo credits:

1. Krissia Spice, Flickr

2. Jim Allebach, Flickr

3. PhotoGraham, Flickr

4. Annie Leibovitz for Vogue

5. Seb Przd, Flickr

6. doublecappuccino, Flickr

7. chezrump, Flickr

8. regolare, Flickr

9. Tony Blay, Flickr

10. Oded Baililty, Israel/The Associated Press

11. ravifoto, Flickr

12. RottieLover, Flickr

13. Cloud nine, Flickr14. Mareen Fischinger, Flickr

Further reading:

1. Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, Mihaly

Csikszentmihalyi

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Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, by Cz himself. It tells you all about his studies of the experience of flow,

as well as the Experience Sampling method that he invented, which is strangely like twitter. It involves a beeper that goes off every so

often, and the subject is supposed to write down what he is doing and how he is feeling.

As interesting as the book is, however, it doesnt provide much practical advice for how to apply their findings to your life. That was my

inspiration for coming up with this system. You can read more about it on my blog at thatvoodooyoudo.com/best-practice/flow. If you just

want a list of those 9 components, you can find them at thatvoodooyoudo.com/9

flow getting into the zone at work 26101

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