Ask HN: What type of work best gets you in a state of Flow?

5 points by greatatuin 7 years ago | 4 comments

Flow as coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, where you are completely focused and in the zone, time is flying by and it's challenging enough to bring you plenty of satisfaction but not too challenging to cause stress and anxiety.

I've realized lately how important this is to my happiness and satisfaction with work. As a web developer though, I find I'm spending more and more time plumbing things together in a stop-start fashion and it's getting harder to achieve.

The best experiences I can remember were when I was building games prototypes in XNA. I was only using the basics of the framework and writing a lot of the engine myself. These days I'm using Unity which is great but once again harder to get into the flow state for me.

I'm feeling the temptation to go back to doing more things the old fashioned way just for this reason.

What type of work do you do that regularly gets you in this state?

amorphous 7 years ago |

Searching for work that brings one into the state of flow is good, but I think it is important not to become too obsessed with it. Otherwise, you may fall into the trap of avoiding difficult work. For example, cleaning the house brings me usually flow, but I wouldn't want to make a living doing that (not that there's anything wrong with cleaning, but I don't think I would enjoy that for long).

I believe any work can bring flow; it's just a matter of keeping the challenge at the right level. In your case, instead of ditching frameworks and implementing engine functionality manually, you may need to find work that requires you to learn new skills and grow.

superasn 7 years ago |

I think this happens to almost everybody who loves their job and the way I've made my peace with it is by making a distinction that this part is my job that I do to make a living (usually repetitive work I may not necessarily like) and this part is what I do because I like it.

So like Google's 80/20% formula I keep one whole day when I work on something that has no purpose without an guilt.

Anyway, For me working with new technologies and working on ideas related to things I find cool. Some recent projects include creating a serverless framework (1), a delphi app that toggles my monitors for my sitting / standing desk, or making side projects like this (2), etc.

Also I find that using repetitive music really helps me get into flow a lot faster. I've found this really weird music genre called "epic aggressive modern hybrid-orchestral music" that really makes me forget everything else besides the work I'm doing.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16552325

(2) https://www.exercisemix.com

acesubido 7 years ago |

> The best experiences I can remember were when I was building games prototypes in XNA. I was only using the basics of the framework and writing a lot of the engine myself.

This happens to me as well, it's easy to keep churning out code when it's coming from my current bag of knowledge. My flow gets wrecked when I try to improve my code, because I have to stop writing the way I'm currently writing things the way I want to. When I mean "improve" code, it has to attain a certain metric and would usually entail giving benefits to other people working on the same codebase. Do I want the code to be more readable? more performant? more modular? more abstracted? would it depend-on/use another library?

> What type of work do you do that regularly gets you in this state?

I find that I go back to a stop-start fashion of working when I don't know have a list of small wins I need to do to finish a big feature or "improving" code. Without that list, it leads me to procrastination.

So the first type of work I do? I bust out my pen and I get a piece of paper. Then I write down a small checklist of classes/methods I need to write, or small things I need to research (with a timebox).

staunch 7 years ago |

1. High energy music.

2. A programming environment I've mastered.

I find it's very difficult to enter the flow state if I'm not listening to the right kind of music or while I'm learning a new platform, language, or framework.