How to Design your Work for Flow
Have you ever wondered how to achieve a flow state at work? I certainly have - ever since hearing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s TED talk on flow being the secret to happiness. Flow is the state you get into when you’re so focused and engaged in what you’re doing, you lose track of time. It’s at the sweet spot of skill meeting challenge:
Image via discoveryinaction.com.au
I spent so many years trying to find work that gets me into this state. We spend so much time of our lives at work - why not optimise it so that we actually enjoy what we’re doing?
Games are a place where we can easily find flow. Have you ever noticed how you repeat the same level many times, even if you fail? There are reasons why games keep us engaged and trying again and again, even when it’s hard. To achieve a flow state at work, you want to design your work in the same way!
A book I read recently had a genius explanation for how to achieve a flow state at work by drawing parallels between game design and designing work to be motivating. That book was The Game Changer by Dr Jason Fox. Today I want to share my key insights from it with you so you can design your work to achieve flow state. Let’s jump in!
Measure your progress
We have things the wrong way around when we think success will make us happy. It’s actually progress towards a goal that makes us happy. Success can be this intangible thing in the future we’ll never reach, because there’s always more to do. When measuring progress on the other hand, you look back on what you’ve achieved rather than reaching into the future.
Progress is the only thing that matters. Perfection, productivity, efficiency - all of these are secondary. If in doubt, always ask ‘Are we making progress happen?’
Dr Jason Fox
Progress motivates us to complete an action. The book highlights a simple example of making progress visible with LinkedIn adding a progress bar to nudge people to complete their profile. Making your own progress visible to yourself is a key tactic to stay motivated. If you are managing a team, try visualising progress made in a month, quarter or year!
Break big goals down into small steps
If the places you want to be are too far away from where you currently are, motivation is low. The book refers to this as the motivation gap. This ties back to the diagram I showed earlier in this article - if the challenge is too hard, we hit anxiety instead of flow. This often results in procrastination.
What can you do about this? Plan out our work! In the book this is referred to as ‘structure casting’. For example, if you want to write a book, break it down to writing a certain number of words each day. If you want to create an artwork, add a little to a mandala every day for 100 days like I did last year 😉 Break your big goal down into small steps, and map them out against a timeline.
Combine this with making your progress visible, and you have a winning formula - both for designing your own work, and for motivating a team.
Strike the balance with goals, rules and feedback
You may have heard about autonomy, mastery and purpose being keys to motivation (if you haven’t here’s a video that explains). The book links this concept to the three core elements of game design: Goals, rules and feedback - which provide the structure to actually make motivation work and get you into a flow state:
Goals tie to purpose. They define the what and the why of the work.
Rules tie to mastery and calibrate the level of challenge. They need to provide clarity and a container for making meaningful progress.
Feedback keeps people working with autonomy by making progress visible.
To tie this back to the progress principle - if your work is not designed with goals, rules and feedback in mind, it’s easy to procrastinate. Generally, our behaviour will default to activities that provide the richest sense of progress. Games are one example, but other activities include cleaning the house or baking. The goals and rules are clear, and you can see that you’re making progress by seeing clean surfaces or having produced a cake you can eat!
TL;DR
So there you have a few tactics to play with and get into flow:
Measure your progress and make it visible
Break big goals down into small steps mapped against a timeline
Use goals, rules and feedback to optimise your work for autonomy, mastery and purpose
Of course I’m only touching the surface here. If you’re interested to learn more, I highly recommend reading The Game Changer by Dr Jason Fox - it’s an entertaining, fun read with many more genius insights into what keeps us motivated and engaged in our work.
Have you tried any of the tactics outlined above? Let me know how you went in the comments!
