An easy flow trick is to set a 48-minute timer; commit to single-tasking for the entire duration. 48 minutes is long enough to get something done, and short enough that you can brute force through distractions (not checking email, RSS, HN, etc).
You'll likely continue past the 48 minutes, if you hit a good flow state, or you can take a deliberate 12 minute break and go for an hourly cycle.
Along similar lines, you can look into the pomodoro technique, which involves a 25min period of work (1 pomodoro) followed by a 5 min break. After 2 pomodoros you typically take a 10 min break.
I use it as a way to push distractions aside. I have a hard time finding flow state unless I firewall myself from ongoing company concerns. 48 minutes--or whatever smallish number--is a good way to get some work done without feeling like I'm totally ignoring everything else. I mean, I am ignoring everything else, but only for a little, so it feels OK.
I run a 3-person game development studio, so I have a lot of other concerns pulling at me (aside from the programming task at hand, or whatever I need to do on the project iself). It's always easier for me to hit flow when I don't have so much meta stuff to worry about.
I agree with your sentiment here. I have found that using a technique like Pomodoro or the 48+12 forces you to focus on a task, and you are essentially practicing to avoid distractions. There are times when I am so involved in a task that the 5 min break seems more of a distraction, so I just plow on.
I guess the point that I am trying to make is it's so much the technique you start with, but rather what you end up with. Having mini-mental distractions seemed like the norm to me, but forcing myself to keep my mind on a particular task allowed me to go for longer periods without being distracted.
After a while, you really don't need a tool to help you focus, but it's a good starting point.
The Pomodoro technique is a timebox mechanism, so it has benefits beyond triggering the state of relaxed focus. The sudden-death nature of a microtimebox like 25/5 and 48/12 is what forces you to eliminate the unnecessary. A person can stay in the flow and do lots of unimportant things beautifully. A timebox often means you make choices and then you keep going, staying in the present. Second-guessing is another form of distraction, as much as falling under Sunk Cost Fallacy.
Another important note: it isn't so much that you avoid distractions as much as you stay in the present moment. Hindsight and foresight may guide your actions, however, you can only act in the present moment.
If your attention seizes on the fact that you are in the zone, you'll start noticing yourself drop out. Your attention is no longer on the task at hand and your mental energy pours into that self-awarenes. If you let the observation pass you by as a ephemeral phenomena, living and dying naturally, you flow with the self-awareness of flow.
Allowing the distractions to flow past you while you stay focused on the task at hand is what gives the optimal results. Trying to completely numb yourself to distractions won't work a well. That's why there's something in the Pomodoro technique where you make a hash tick and write down what you want to do later; it flushes that thought out of the queue. It also keeps your peripheral awareness opened up so that your right-brain-side can explore alternate avenues and come up with innovative, and occasionally creative solutions. If you stay focused strictly by blocking everything else out, you gain tunnel vision. In that state, a person crushes obstacles by banging his head against it enough times. Otherwise known as Brute Force and leads to Sunk Cost Fallacy.
Physical relaxation is also very important -- so good, supportive posture, deeper and relaxed breathing.
If you want to practice all of this in a deeper way, I recommend http://www.vipassana.com/meditation/mindfulness_in_plain_eng... This concept and the way to enter "flow" is not new. It's pretty ancient. I've used the Pomodoro technique to configure my work environment, but mindfulness is what I practice to optimize my ability to perform.
I highly recommend the book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Mihaly is well respected professor of psychology and management at Claremont University. I don't say this lightly - there is no other book that has had a greater, positive impact on my overall life. Enjoy!
Funny I was reading about him on "The Happiness Hypothesis" (nice book, not pop psychology.) and his contribution on "positive psychology". Definitely will check out that book.
I have been recently doing a lot of reading on social psychology, any other book you (or anyone else) would recommend?
"Game designers, particularly video and computer games, benefit from integration of flow principles into gameplay design."
Gamers will get into zones, similar to athletes, where their reaction times become ultra quick and reflexes are super sharp. Game designers sometimes try to bake these directly into the game, and it's arguable whether or not it's beneficial. For example, many people complain about the killstreak rewards in Modern Warfare 2; once you get going, you're pretty much indestructible.
Continuing on the theme of building game mechanics into our projects... couldn't we do this if we wanted to?
Post-deploy hooks are available for your source control system of choice. You could have your computer tell you "Nice job" for one commit (if automated tests pass), "Keep it going!" for two in an interval, "He's on fire!" for three, "BOOM that's amazing!" for four, etc etc. This would incentivize yourself to do "just one more commit", in the same fashion as Civ and whatever get "just one more turn."
(If doing it over a work day wasn't working for you, you could bump the visualization to your dashboard and create a chain, with one link for every day you do task X. Don't break the chain, as per Seinfeld.)
This assumes, critically, that a commit is a measure of forward progress towards business goals.
Making the top-tier artificially better is annoying. I seriously dislike it, and I do extremely well in most shooters. It hides skill, because one quite-good player with a lucky start can dominate an entire game. Even if that doesn't happen, it still screws over the people learning / less skilled, which just prevents people from getting better, which prevents more people from playing.
My personal favorites are top-deprecating, where the top player is slightly easier to hit / harder to play / worth more points, or totally flat. It makes it extremely hard to really shine in a game, and when someone maintains a good score, they've earned it.
That game is awesome for flow. Within minutes, you start dodging on instinct alone, and the world flies past you. My personal favorite though goes to F-Zero GX. If I play that for a while, I start dominating other games because I'm so keyed-up and focused. Too bad it fades :\
Also Jeff Minter's games, most recently Space Giraffe and Gridrunner Revolution. SG in particular is designed around getting you in the zone and giving you so much information to process that you have to filter everything else out.
"Flow" is a modern take on a very old idea. Atheletes and martial artists before that have been using various methods to enter this state.
Josh Waitzkin figured out a method for consistently triggering flow in his book, _Art of Learning_. The structure of his method depends on simple things, mainly behavioral conditioning. The method works. I also want to note, he has used it for both primarily mental tasks (chess) as well as physical (competitive push-hands).
One last thing: Deepak Chopra produced a game specifically designed to teach someone to enter the state of mindfulness (which, when applied to challenging tasks, gets you flow). It is called "Journey into the Wild Divine". It uses a USB sensor stuck on your finger to measure heart-rate variability, among other things. You can only advance through parts of the game when you can demonstrate the ability to consciously relax and stabilize your heart rate at will. It's a game specifically to teach flow, not just to reward or punish the secondary effects of flow.
That graph looks wrong: According to it if you have low-middle skill and enter the difficulty level that creates anxiety, a person of less skill would only feel worry.
I think it makes more sense if you think of the perceived difficulty of a challenge being relative and linked to the skill level for a particular person. That is, for a person with low-middle skill there is a challenge level that creates anxiety. Give that same challenge to a lower skill level person and it will create even more anxiety. So the scales are different between people of different skill level. I don't know if that helps at all.
Yeah. If you're in the Anxiety area it means that you're under-skilled and over-challenged for the task in question.
A little bit of anxiety might not be bad though. As your skills improve then you might pass in to the Arousal phase. But also as your skills improve the challenge is decreased (gravitate towards the middle). Eventually you might become over-skilled at the task and the challenge becomes low, then you're Relaxed.
Yes it has. It's pretty cool discovering something new, eh? What's more interesting is that these ideas are not really new. They are ancient. Check out "Mindfulness in Plain English" as an example.
If you want a modern book on how to consistently trigger this state, there is Josh Waitzkin, _Art of Learning_
You'll likely continue past the 48 minutes, if you hit a good flow state, or you can take a deliberate 12 minute break and go for an hourly cycle.
Simple Windows timer: http://www.orzeszek.org/blog/2009/08/21/simple-countdown-tim...
And Mac dashboard widget: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/calculate_convert/m...