Getting into the “flow”
Posted in Productivity, Psychology on November 30th, 2006 | No Comments »
Do you know this feeling ? Sometimes you are really struggling to get things done effectively, while at other times you are highly productive and everything seems so easy. Well, at those times when everything goes so easy you are in the state of “flow”.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”; researched this topic and describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”.
Wouldn’t it be great to get yourself into this state, whenever you want ? Nick Smith shares this vision and wrote The little book of flow on his Life 2.0 blog.
The premise of this essay is that those exquisite but all too rare moments when we experience ‘flow’, when we are truly creative, happy and intuitively know exactly what is needed, are simply those instances when we glimpse our original and true nature. It sets out to show how, instead of trying to fathom the conditions for flow, we can realise this ‘true nature’ and make ‘flow’ our normal way of being, wherever we are and in whatever we do.
Nick has some excellent points on how to get yourself into the state of “flow”. A word of warning though: this is not easy to digest. The printed version of this article weighs in at over 30 pages, but its well worth the time and effort.