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Why you're not finding Flow at work (and what to do about it)
"The best moments occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile … in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery—or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life—that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine."
Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Requirements To Enter Flow
To enter flow, you need appropriated self-control, environmental conditions, skills, task and rewards. Besides that, you must know what you’re doing, be able to see whether or not you’re ...
Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi
"In the flow-like state, we exercise control over the contents of our consciousness rather than allowing ourselves to be passively determined by external forces."
Self control to trigger a state of Flow
To get into a state of flow more often, we need to be able to increase our level of control over our consciousness:
- Find standards to determine whether any action you’re going to take is desirable towards getting into a state of flow.
- Self-control and flow depend on immediate feedback; find ways to constantly monitor your performance and adjust as you continue.
- Be wary of your mental energy. Define your work schedule to account for the variations in mental strength throughout the day.
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Key Ideas
How to trigger the flow state
- Flow follows focus, and taking physical or social risks drives focus into the now.
- Change your routine and increase novelty, unpredictability, and complexity
- F...
Research Findings On Flow
- When a person is in a state of flow, all five potent neurochemicals massively amplify the immune system.
- While on flow, stress-causing hormones are flushed out of body, and the autoimmune and nervous systems go haywire.
- A Gallup poll found that most American workers are disengaged and spends less than 5% of their day in flow.
What Flow is
Flow is an optimal state of consciousness, when you feel and perform your best. It’s the moment of total absorption.
Time speeds up or slows down like a freeze-frame effect. Mental and physical ability go through the roof, and the brain takes in more information per second, processing it more deeply.
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Key Ideas
To-Do Lists
Your to-do list can be a tool that guides you through your work, or it can be a big fat pillar of undone time bombs taunting you and your unproductive inadequacy.
If the instructions are c...
The two modes
- When a project or task comes up, the steps you need to take start to form in your mind. Now you're in thinking/Boss mode.
- Your to-do list is a collection of those orders, which your Assistant personality will later pick up and do.
Put Items That You're Definitely Doing
Instead of letting tasks you're not quite committed to loiter on your to-do list until you're sick of looking at them, move them off to a separate list, a holding area for Someday/Maybe items.
Only concrete actions you're committed to completing should live on your to-do list.