Introduction

Have you ever been so engrossed in your work that you lost track of time? This is called flow. It’s a state of mind where you are fully immersed in the task at hand. You might say “I was in the zone” or “in the groove”. Being in a state of flow is almost peaceful and that’s a surprising word to use for when you’re being super productive!

What is flow?

Flow is a concept credited to Mihalyi Csíkszentmihályi, a Hungarian psychology professor, who described his observations in academic articles and in the popular book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. According to this book you can achieve flow by doing these three things:

• enabling immediate feedback
• balancing capability and challenge
• setting clear goals with visible progress

Let’s look at each of the necessary elements of flow in a bit more detail.

Enabling immediate feedback

Have you ever completed an important time-consuming piece of work, delivered it on time, and had absolutely no one even comment on it? We have. It’s soul destroying, and a good way to lose motivation for doing any further work. As humans we crave feedback. It’s also critical for productivity. Without regular feedback from customers, or colleagues it is easy to expend effort going in the wrong direction.

We believe one of the reasons we are productive is that we always work together. As soon as one of us completes a task (like writing this chapter), the other person reviews the task and gives feedback. If changes are needed we can do them immediately and get the task completed, rather than waiting for feedback and moving on to another task whilst we wait. Immediate feedback is a key principle in agile, this book includes lots of ideas from agile that help you get quick feedback.

Balancing capability and challenge

Karen is an avid Xbox gamer. She can spend hours engrossed in a game without realising how much time is passing. She is in a state of flow. However if the game is too difficult, for example she keeps dying, or can’t finish something in the required time, she quickly gets annoyed and bored. Flow is gone. Sometimes she even shouts at the TV!

The idea of balancing capability with challenge is critical. It’s also unique to each person. For example, Karen is really good at strategy games. She has a high capability for them. Because of this, she enjoys playing even difficult strategy games. In fact, if the game is too easy, she gets bored. Driving games is a whole other story. She can’t even drive for 15 seconds in Grand Theft Auto without crashing the car. (Note from Sam: Karen struggles with real life driving too!).

If you find work frustrating and boring, think about your capability for the work you are doing, as well as the challenge the work presents. If they are not a good match, you might need to either grow your capability or take on more challenging work.

Setting clear goals with visible progress

One of our favourite quotes is from Peter Drucker: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

If you don’t know what your goal is and how you are doing against it, you might very well be heading in the wrong direction. That doesn’t result in flow or productivity. Our favourite way to check this is with a visible task board. We have a Kanban board between us on our desk. Each morning we plan what needs to be done, add tasks to the board, and shuffle priorities. There is nothing more satisfying at the end of the day than a bunch of tasks in the “Done” column. In fact the amount of tasks done is usually correlated with how much flow we achieved during the day.

A good game?

If you’ve studied game design, or if you are a gamer you might notice a similarity with some of the requirements for a good game.

Jane McGonigal defines a good game as any activity with:

• a clear goal
• clear rules
• a way to obtain frequent feedback
• optional participation

Given this, it is not a surprise that achieving flow regularly at work increases your happiness and reduces your stress. It’s like spending your day playing a good game, rather than working!

Using this book to achieve flow

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could experience more flow in your everyday life? This book is designed to help you do just that.

You can use this book in a number of ways.

• You could devour all the content at once and live happily ever after in flow
• You can dip your toes in, read a tip or two and try them out for yourself or your team
• You can pick a technique to improve your flow and then later refer back to the book for more tips
• You can play a game with your team to experience flow and discuss how your team can work towards achieving flow daily

We highly recommend revisiting this book regularly. You should not adopt all the tips in one go. Try a few, and when those are working well, dip in to this book for a few more ideas. Some tips might work better than others for you. Definitely remember to pick up this book whenever you are doing a headless chicken dance - thats our term for running around multitasking and not getting anything done!