Reimagining the task

Most people don’t know how to focus on things they dislike doing for very long. They constantly drift from one thing to another as soon as a task gets too hard, boring, or uncomfortable.

There’s a way to stay focused on a task without waiting for the elusive state of flow. It’s called “play!” Play can simply be a tool that helps to sustain our attention long enough to complete the task at hand.

Instead of trying in vain to find flow, we can do two things to turn any task into play:

• Add constraints.
• Find the mystery.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” in the 1970s. He defines it as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doi...