The Pursuit of "Flow" Is Overrated

Flow is great when you can get it. But the price of relying too much on flow is that when you can’t find it, you’re more likely to succumb to the vicious cycle of distraction—a horrible loop of frustration and perpetual time scarcity.

• If you feel anxious, restless, or poorly qualified for a task, for example, those internal triggers may drive you to pick up your smartphone to scroll through Instagram or check the news in order to forget that feeling for a while.
• Likewise, a task that is not inherently engaging and enjoyable can elicit the internal triggers that lead us off track.

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.