Achieving Flow State to Improve Writing Productivity
Your term paper is due soon. The writing is going well for the first hour, but then you get a notification from your phone. You try to ignore it, but you keep thinking about it. Finally, you give in, planning to check it quickly and get back to work. However, you quickly get sucked into a wave of social media, which then spirals into a black hole of notifications and distractions. This process has now eaten up twice the amount of time you potentially could have spent writing. That one little distraction interrupted your state of flow.
Flow is best defined as a state where your concentration and engagement are fully focused on the activity you are pursuing. When you are in a state of flow, you are able to be productive while forgetting about outside influences such as space, and time. Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi developed this theory after studying experts in a variety of fields. These experts said they could work on their tasks for hours, ignoring food and sleep, because they were so engaged. People in a state of flow say that they were “in the zone!” and “on a roll!”, and that “time really flew!” However, getting into a state of flow can be hard. As shown in the matrix, the best way to achieve this state is by having high levels of both challenge and skill. If your skill is not equal to the challenge, you may feel anxiety. If the task is not challenging compared to your skill level, you might feel relaxed, but you won’t achieve the high levels of productivity that come with flow state.
This theory helped me understand why I sometimes felt anxious when working on big assignments and why it sometimes took me a while to settle into those assignments. Last semester, I had a paper due for one of my classes, and it was initially hard for me to sit down and write. I realized that my difficulty in achieving a state of flow might have stemmed from two things: distractions and a mismatch between my skills and the challenge posed by the paper.
Therefore, I put away all distractions away. I cleared off my desk, turned off my cell phone, and closed my door. Next, I looked through my notes and course materials to see where my challenge level was at. Doing this, I realized that I knew a lot more about the paper topic than I had originally thought. Now that I knew my skills were up to the challenge, I was able to quickly achieve a flow state and finish the rough draft of my paper!
While I have known about the terrible power of distractions for a long time, it is only recently that I learned how to manufacture writing situations to facilitate flow. I can make a writing task easier or harder to match my skill level. If writing a paper is initially too hard, I can start by reviewing my notes and copying relevant materials into a new file. This increases my skills and decreases the challenge simultaneously. If a writing assignment is initially boring because it is too easy, I can challenge myself to write it in half the time or I can deliberately make the writing more difficult, for example, by strenuously avoiding passive voice or by doubling the number of references.
By avoiding distractions and matching my skill level to the challenge before me, I have been finding it easier to achieve that desired state of fully engaged productivity. I hope these strategies help you achieve flow state more often in your own writing.
Francesca Alonzi is a junior at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she is pursuing a degree in Criminal Justice with a minor in Psychology. She has been a member of the Interactive Measurement Group since Spring of 2019. Post graduation she plans on pursing a career in the forensic psychology field.