Monday Blues: Coffee and The Flow

Bored out of your mind? Need a pick me up after a heavy lunch? Why not read about "Flow" and how you might use it to supercharge your day all in time it takes to drink that cup of coffee you just ordered?

Peak performance is not just exclusive to athletes

What is Flow?

Steven Kotler (Author of The Rise of Superman and The Art of Impossible) defines flow as “…an optimal state of consciousness, a state where you feel your best and perform your best.” Similarly, athletes and musicians talk about being “in the zone”, or experiencing a “runners’ high”.

I Work In An Office - How is This Relevant To Me?

Thankfully, this phenomenon is not the exclusive domain sportsmen and sportswomen, or the creative sorts. Even those who work in the most mundane of white-collar jobs have sometimes experienced flow.

You’ve probably experienced flow yourself when you complete a task and you are surprised by the amount of time that had passed without you noticing, the level of focus you had while doing it and the quality or quantity of the end result. It may be something as simple as creating a spreadsheet from scratch or writing that report or memo. It may even be when you are on stage (or just in front of your team) presenting a slide deck.

Great. How Does Knowing This Help Me?

If you’ve experienced it, we don’t have to spend much time convincing you how effective and productive it can be to be in a flow-state. However, most people think that being in a flow-state is more akin to a fluke, something that happens rarely and without intention or design.

Most people would be half right – flow isn’t just sitting down and forcibly staring at a screen for two hours. That may get you through a laborious, repetitive task with no requirement for any cognitive contribution, but that is not flow. And it is certainly not peak performance.

What people can do though is to set up a number of triggers that will encourage flow. Researchers have identified more than 20 flow triggers.

Here, we would like to focus on just the three things that you can do right now, today, on a Monday that is potentially wearing you down as the minutes tick by.

Instead of, or better yet, in addition to that after lunch flat white coffee, these could potentially give you that extra lift to get you through the rest of the afternoon – or even the week ahead.

Tip 1: Distraction Management to allow Complete Concentration

This is as simple as just silencing your phone for the next two hours, and actually put it in a place that is not within your field of vision. Studies have shown that even if it’s been turned off, if the phone is within reach, you will constantly pick it up even when there hasn’t been any notification. Trust us, your willpower isn’t as strong as you think it is.

Turn off your laptop Wi-Fi – if your work doesn’t require you to be surfing through the web or plugged into a network. If it does, at least turn on your DND on your message apps or close that page with your inbox, so your focus isn’t pulled away every time an email or message comes through.

You could also put on your earphones. This is where anyone with a pair of noise-cancelling ear cans will have an advantage. Listen to something that picks you up. We highly suggest fast jazz – wordless with a high tempo beat. Even if you aren’t listening to anything, if you are in an office the sight of headphones will make your colleagues think twice before trying to engage you in mindless chat.

Tip 2: Set Clear Goals and Arrange for Immediate Feedback (where possible)

Set clear goals which are attainable and aligned to your skills and abilities, while still ensuring that it is still challenging (more on “challenge” later).

For example, you may have a 15-page memo that covers a variety of sections that has a deadline of the end of this week. Your goal shouldn’t be to complete the entire thing in one afternoon, if you average a good page an hour. Maybe aim for 3 pages in 2 hours, targeting to complete specific sections.

The focus here should be on clarity of the goals. Clear goals impact concentration. Proving this is the University of Illinois experiment where participants were shown a film of basketball players passing a ball around a court, and asked to count the number of passes. At the end of the clip, most participants could correctly provide the number of passes, but failed to see a man in a gorilla costume walking between the players halfway through the video.

Once you have your goals clearly defined, immediate feedback is important. Find a team mate, a peer or even your direct report, who might be available at the end of the 2 hours to quickly read or review what you have drafted. Set this up before you start writing, so you are accountable not just to yourself, but also a colleague who had kindly agreed to take some time out of their busy day to help you. This immediate feedback makes any necessary course correction apparent and provides validation if you are heading in the right direction.

Tip 3: Challenge/Skill Ratio

This means that the activity that you have set out to do should have a sense of balance between the ability level and the challenge i.e., neither too easy nor too difficult.

Doing something too easy will lead to boredom, and doing something too difficult will result in fear overwhelming you. The sweet spot between challenge/skill is by far the hardest to achieve but the most important condition to try attaining.

Going back to the example of the 15-page memo, this is why you might want to try to write one and a half, instead of one page, per hour, just to push yourself. Challenging yourself could also take the form of trying something new (to pursue novelty, a dopamine trigger which also encourages flow), such as attempting to write a section of the memo that you are not usually responsible for, or one that might require further research into an area of work that you are unfamiliar with but keen to learn more about (curiosity, an important intrinsic motivator).

If You Are Still Reading This...

...then you might be interested in learning more about Flow and optimal performance. For more bite-sized information, you can head to the series of videos uploaded by Big Think on Flow (first of a series below).

Or you can check out the books by Steven Kotler called "The Rise of Superman" and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience."

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