Finding Flow
Notes on Flow State
Deep Life Notes | Flow State
The best work often comes when challenge and skill meet, distractions disappear, and we become fully absorbed in something difficult.
I recently watched a documentary film called The Alpinist. It told the story of a shy twenty-three-year-old Canadian mountain climber and alpinist called Marc-André Leclerc. Even within the extreme sports community, Leclerc was an outlier, climbing anonymously with no ropes or partner, scaling ferocious walls of ice and rock with the intuitive grace and speed of a master technician.
The footage in the film is both electrifying and terrifying. What struck me most about Leclerc was the purity of his dedication and his zen-like state of ‘flow’ when climbing: his body and mind in perfect alignment, his extraordinary skills matched to the audacity of the challenge. Leclerc was part of that mountain.
In his famous investigations of “optimal experience”, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal book, Flow, revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow.
His research showed that the best moments in people’s lives (what makes life worth living) usually took place when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary way to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile. They’re completely immersed in the task. Everything feels effortless and there’s no sense of time passing. And it feels great. This is flow.
But it can be elusive.
Why flow matters
In our often distracted and overloaded professional lives, a regular experience of flow can change how work feels and what it produces.
Flow can make work feel more satisfying, more creative, and more engaging. It can also build confidence, improve the quality of what we produce, and deepen the kind of career capital that comes from doing difficult things well.
To summarise, flow can help us feel:
More satisfaction
More engagement
More creativity (as we are less self-conscious in this state)
More confidence (that we can achieve what we originally thought impossible)
More productivity
More career capital (through higher quality work)
Work is, in fact, one of the best environments for flow. Csikszentmihalyi’s research showed that people experienced flow 54% of the time at work, compared with only 18% for leisure activities. It’s why you’ll hear a colleague say they were “in the zone,” although more often today you’ll probably hear them say they are “swamped.”
Despite over half of those respondents experiencing flow at work, when asked, most said they would prefer to work less and have more free time. The author concluded this is because people feel they are investing their attention against their will at work. This correlates with a previous theme I explored about unreasonable work volumes overloading the brain and creating anxiety and dissatisfaction.
Conditions that make flow more likely
A useful question to ask is what conditions make flow more likely, especially when work so often feels fragmented.
Three conditions seem to matter:
1. Challenge and skill need to meet
If something feels too challenging, we likely won’t get into a flow state because we become stressed and anxious. If something feels too easy, however, we get bored. Neither states create flow. The ideal spot is when we have an interesting, challenging task and the skills and competencies to tackle it. For me, writing an essay is a perfect example. It’s hard, a little maddening, a lot of revisions, but in the end I can do it.
2. Clear goals help
Another key factor of flow is setting clear and realistic goals. It can help when regular work connects to a larger team or organisational purpose. When we see how our work has a visible connection to something larger, it becomes easier to prioritise and do well.
3. Flow needs unbroken direction
A cornerstone of flow is working with deliberate and unbroken focus. Distraction makes that difficult. Context-switching and multi-tasking break the conditions flow depends on. It’s like trying to work your way through a tough exam and having someone ask you every few minutes if you have the time, or what your plans are later. Under these conditions, our brains work best by focusing on one thing at a time.
Project management company Asana ran a study showing 80% of knowledge workers report working with their inbox or other communication apps open. These condition are not ripe for flow. We might therefore consider becoming unavailable for a time. The phone, inbox, and messenger tools may need to be closed rather than waiting in the background, where they are impatient to announce themselves at the first opportunity.
Motivation from within the self
There is another important factor conducive to the flow state: working off intrinsic (internal) rather than extrinsic (external) motivation. Intrinsic motivation is doing an activity for its inherent satisfaction, such as the fun or challenge involved. It comes from within the individual. Extrinsic motivation is about behaviour driven by external rewards, such as money, praise, or status, such as what other people think of us.
Intrinsic motivation usually comes from three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Flow is more likely when the work feels chosen rather than imposed. It feels more natural and autonomous, where we have a sense of personal control over the task. Something we choose rather than something we are forced to do.
In professional life, this often means finding new challenges, learning more about the work and our roles, and building craft rather than simply clocking in and out.
This is where curiosity is a great partner: our desire to learn more about how an organisation works and how we can play a specific role in its growth and success. This can make work feel less like obligation and more like enjoyment and participation by recognising the opportunities for action and developing new skills.
Isaac Newton spent eighteen months living in a farmhouse and it was there he formed his theory of gravity and changed the face of science. He simply enjoyed the act of improving his scientific skills. He was building his craft on the way to mastering it.
Curiosity and Purpose
I’m celebrating 16 years at my company, Dell Technologies. It’s a remarkable company to work for because it has a founder and leader, Michael Dell, who embodies curiosity and understands the importance of purpose. In his 2021 book, Play Nice But Win, he talks about having a purpose for his company.
“What you really want is for your employees to understand the purpose of the company and feel inspired by it. To feel that what they’re doing is incredibly important to all your customers and serves a greater purpose.”
Many people need something more than just a monthly salary to find meaning in what they do. All the research shows the sole pursuit of wealth and status rarely leads to a fulfilling life. Look no further than the story of Charles Foster Kane.
Toward more flow
Flow seems to come when we have enough control to choose the work, enough skill to meet the challenge, and enough attention to stay with it. These are not small things. They are part of what makes work, and life, feel less fragmented. We often need to stretch ourselves and get immersed in something. As human beings, we are very good at doing this.
In other words, we have the capacity to get into a flow state on a regular basis.
The more often we enter that state, the more life comes together. Like the alpinist, scaling our own mountains of rock and ice. On our own terms, reaching for and sometimes attaining the sublime.