Happiness

some thoughts on finding flow, balance, and getting things done

Once, when I was leading tooling efforts on Xbox One, I was writing a utility to de-elevate the permission of a process (people usually write utilities to go the other way). I was “in the zone”, and was writing and debugging for most of the day without noticing time, and I loved it. I was in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as “Flow”.

Chick-Sent-Me-High

In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi describes eight characteristics of Flow:

1. Complete concentration on the task

2. Clarity of goals and reward in mind and immediate feedback

3. Transformation of time (speeding up/slowing down)

4. The experience is intrinsically rewarding

5. Effortlessness and ease

6. There is a balance between challenge and skills

7. Actions and awareness are merged, losing self-conscious rumination

8. There is a feeling of control over the task

Now, Flow isn’t about getting things done - when we’re in a state of flow, we’re happy. It’s also important to note that Flow isn’t just about work. Spring is here, and I’ve …