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 professional capability that comes from doing difficult things well.
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 connects to the problem of 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 state creates flow. The ideal spot is when we have an interesting, challenging task and the skills and ability 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 attention
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 conditions 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
Isaac Newton spent eighteen months living in a farmhouse and it was there he developed ideas that would help form his theory of gravity and change the face of science. He was absorbed in the act of improving his scientific skills.
Newton’s story highlights another important factor conducive to the flow state: working from 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, status, and 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 matters: our desire to learn more about how an organisation works and how we can play a role in it. This can make work feel less like obligation and more like enjoyment and participation by recognising the opportunities for action and developing new skills.
Many people need something more than just a monthly salary to find meaning in what they do. Research suggests the sole pursuit of wealth and status rarely leads to a fulfilling life. For those who know their cinema, look no further than the story of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen 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 more often than we might think.
The more often we enter that state, the more work—and life—can feel like it comes together.
Like the alpinist, scaling our own mountains of rock and ice. On our own terms, reaching for and sometimes attaining the sublime.
Pass It On
If this note was worth your time, it may be worth someone else’s.
Share it with a friend, or read more Deep Life Notes here.