Step-by-step guide to experience flow

Flow, the ‘secret to happiness,’ is closer than you think 🙂

Here is a step-by-step guide for experiencing flow (almost) every day.

Quick recap: What is flow? It is such a deep immersion in a task that you lose track of everything, including the passage of time. Like meditation, it is a truly blissful experience. But how does one create flow?

In his book ‘Flow’, psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, explains the 8 conditions required for flow but since the book is a hard read, let me simplify it for you in a step-by-step process:

Step 1: Pick a short-term goal that you really care about.

Normally, our attention is all over the place, as multiple stimuli and thoughts keep distracting us. But when we have a compelling goal (e.g., a tight deadline), our focus automatically narrows down and our mind drops everything else.

This narrowing of focus is the first step for flow.

Step 2: Make sure that the above goal is not too easy or hard. If it is too challenging, you feel anxious. If too easy, you get bored.

Ideally, pick a task you clearly know how to accomplish. E.g., working on a spreadsheet or presentation, where you have a clear picture of the end product.

Step 3: Let go of distractions and allow your attention to settle down – no phone calls, email checks, or WhatsApp pings. This is an absolute must.

Also, it helps to have a short ‘focus sprint’, typically 25-50 minutes in duration. During my sprints, I often put the phone in flight mode and have a timer gently ticking in the background (My favorite tool is ‘Be Focused’ Chrome extension).

Step 4: As you work on the task, you should be able to get instant feedback on whether you are on track and if not, what you need to change.

If it is a task you are fairly familiar with, you can automatically sense when you are going off-track and how to fix it. E.g., since I often write for LinkedIn or HabitStrong blog, I know when the piece is shaping up well and what I need to change.

These 4 steps are pretty much what you need for flow every day.

An hour of flow will get you way more work done than in 2-3 hrs of dawdling around.

But more importantly, this will open up a window to a happy life. Because when the days are joyful, life automatically becomes joyful 🙂 

– Rajan

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