The Anectodal Effects of Flow
Flow has been written about in many books, promoted as an enjoyable way of spending time. A time when your mind and body are at ease with their surroundings, wholly focussed on the task at hand. Time, rumination of the past, anxiety for the future all subside, replaced by the focus of doing, the quiet but intent activity of the moment.
Agile and Lean literature has in recent years anchored to this as an important contributor to the wellbeing and success of high-performing teams (forget psych safety, people in flow are happy people). Books such as Managing Flow or The Flow System have elucidated key ingredients for achieving this state and so too can we take council from other perspectives.
“Every man who has acquired some unusual skill enjoys exercising it until it has become a matter of course, or until he can longer improve himself.”
The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell
And this is one of the key reasons that the creation of software products, engineering, and delivery create such a compelling career for those that have found a love of learning, it is a subject that at least for our foreseeable future provides a bottomless pit of knowledge and a reminder of the need to generalize and specialize across an expansive domain of subjects in the pursuit of creating value, through values.
Equally, at times it can be the source of much frustration. I speak to friends that bemoan the state of the industry, people feeling helpless to the boxes they find themselves in, yearning to contribute in more ways than their current disposition is allowing.
“A man who runs three-mile races will cease to find pleasure in this occupation when he passes the age at which he can beat his own previous record”.
The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell
The problem knowledge workers have is that they have adapted well to uncertain, complex work; stepped into it because it is a learning pursuit, but found that the industry socializes and commoditizes what was once a challenge to discover. There in brings a conflict between the creativity and space they yearn, versus the commercial need for repeatable patterns. This contradicting duality; to need creativity, to abstract, and to frame complexity is born from our desire for our current experiences to create the same wonder as our first despite the innateness of human nature that steers us towards models at the earliest opportunity.
“At 45, most executives have reached the peak of their business careers, and they know it. After 20 years of doing very much the same kind of work, they are very good at their jobs. But they are not learning or contributing or deriving challenge and satisfaction from the job”
Managing Oneself — Drucker
In order to find happiness, equanimity. We need to be at peace with the many conflicts, internal and external that we encounter day-to-day. On one hand, as professionals, codification, and specialization are necessary for the success of the firm, especially at scale. On the other, as agents, we need to experience wonder, learn new things, and tap into our creative needs. Where we begin to find work and life mundane the ability to achieve flow will become elusive and result in our internal narratives, unhelpful voices becoming all-consuming. “The devil makes work for idle hands” is as true of the bench as it is of boredom at home and in this time of incarceration we owe it to ourselves to assert effort to build habits that find different channels for achieving flow.
“The same kind of pleasure, though in a less intense form, is to be derived from a great deal of work of a humbler kind”
The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell
We can’t just rely on a vocation to provide us with the flow time we need to be happy, finding other sources of focus can help us grow. Day to day it's important to remember that we aren't our minds and at times we can be quite polarised from the internal voices that invade our consciousness. By finding sources of focus we can help manage the relationship with this part of the organism and control its appetite for stealing from the moment. This internal conflict becomes a minor and irrelevant distraction if we can find ways to keep our focus in places of value.
Companies go to great lengths to promote wellbeing, most enterprises have numbers you can call for some off-the-shelf CBT, the AppStore has no shortage of meditation apps and philosophies of life probably have more books published now than once existed on the shelves of the library of Alexandria. But there are still companies that miss the most fundamental step in keeping their workforce maintained and that is uninterrupted problem solving, creating, building, delivering, focus, and therefore flow. There is nothing more tragic, a waste of human potential than a firm needing productivity but mired in its own insecurities to the extent it is unable to empower agents to work in the optimum and by virtue of this achieve that perfect state of being.
My own observations of flow are anecdotally measurable. As I disappear into my writing I can reflect back and see the impact this time has on my heart rate; thinking through the books I have read and what snippets of wisdom or quotes I can build sentences around, reading through a draft, and trying to iron out all the grammar mistakes: trying. It reaches its lowest ebb when I am wholly focused on the pointless and substandard task at hand. The same applies when I’m learning to code, playing poker, reading, or using my new Kamado Joe (these things rock). The route to a happy life is a simple one, the syntax of the solution will be different for all of us, but all we need is to find ways to keep the brain silent, keep it busy, keep it focussed on tasks that challenge it, and ensure we continue to do this in as many ways as is necessarily possible.
“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible”
Richard Feynman
