I've been feeling edgy and unproductive recently. I notice that I'm doing a little of a lot of things, rather than doing and achieving any one thing. It's frustrating, not only because things don't seem to be getting done, but because I am addicted to those sessions when I get totally absorbed in what I'm doing and the world around me disappears. It's when I'm at my most creative and I come out feeling high and a richer and fuller person. Without those moments I feel irritable.
In this context my eyes lit up when I read Pedro's post where he reflects on "The Flow" after a presentation by Janette Girod at Bar Camp. Janette also writes a blog post about the flow, a concept researched and written about by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist who devoted his life's work to the study of what makes people truly happy, satisfied and fulfilled.
According to wikipedia Flow is
"the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed
in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized
focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity".
Yes, I recognise that! And I want more of it!
You can increase the frequency of flow in two ways. One is by training your ability to concentrate. Genius comes out when you are fully engaged in what you are doing. You can also engineer the circumstances that allow flow to occur. For that you need to know that nine elements which allow flow to occur are:
- Clear goals.
- A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention.
- A loss of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
- Distorted sense of time
- Direct and immediate feedback; behaviour can be adjusted as needed.
- Balance between ability level and challenge.
- A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
- Intrinsically rewarding action, so there is an effortlessness of action.
- Focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself.
What I'm getting from all this is that I have to manage better the interruptions in my life. I need to manage better my multimembership in different communities and projects, maybe by scheduling and sticking to different times for each. I think I should also turn off Skype and MSN (it's not enough to set them to "do not disturb" as people ignore that) and work on one project at a time, not allowing myself to respond to emails or messages on Project X while I'm working on Project Y. I should get a better filing system (and use it) where different projects stay in different folders, different locations in the office.
(Post-it note to self: Get a timer, Bev, to help track how much time you are spending on what).
As Janette says "It's as simple as that:
"Clarifying your short-term goals, closing out likely distractions, letting go of your expectations of how people will react to your work, setting apart a period of time and letting a timer keep track of it, testing early and often, adjusting tasks to the right level of difficulty, mastering your tools, enjoying craftsmanship for its own sake, and training your mind to wander less. All of these are simple things within themselves, though perhaps a lot to keep track of at once. You can integrate these components into your work style all at once or bit by bit. The end result will be the same: a fuller, more satisfying engagement with your work, yielding higher quality results."
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