Fewer meetings should lead to more “Flow.”
Lately I’ve been reading some of the work of Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who’s most famous for his book Flow. For decades now, Professor C. has researched creativity and happiness; his theory of flow talks about how creative (and happy) people come to enter flow-states. In layperson’s terms, flow equates to being “in the zone” for an athlete. It’s that state when you become totally immersed in what you’re doing, totally unaware of the passage of time.
Which, it occurs to me now, would seem to be impossible in a business day full of meetings. Csikszentmihalyi’s research has shown that it often takes 15 minutes of uninterrupted work in an open-ended session before a person will really sink down into the flow state of full creativity and engagement. And people are less likely to do this when they know they have a pressing obligation coming up — and much less when Outlook pings them about the items crowding their day’s schedule.
Surely I’m not the first person to make this connection, but it bears repeating anyhow: as much as possible, you need to defend portions of your day when you can shut out distractions, forget what time it is, and just work without worry. Meetings — especially scattered throughout the day — can only disrupt this process.
A topic for another time: the toxic, anti-Flow effect of e-mail notifications.
(And yes, this is coming from a Twitter user. Hey, I never said I was perfect!)
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Although a hard-core multitasker myself, my experience suggests that yes, we need distraction free quiet times in order to create something substantial.
Lots of people however have written entire books by focusing for 15 to 30 minutes at a time.
I will order and read Flow. Thanks for your post.
-ron k jeffries
[...] Tim Walker writes about the need for interruption free time, and suggests that then plethora of meetings in a normal business day is not productive. [...]
Ron — Maybe lots of people have written entire books by focusing 15 or 20 minutes at a time. But how many *great* books have been written this way? Many writers report that they need deep pools of time to swim around in so that they can work their ideas into shape.
When I find myself defending my own multitasking ways, the defense tends to be rooted in how I *feel* about multitasking — i.e. that I like doing it. It’s very hard (it might be impossible) for me to argue legitimately that multitasking is better for me in terms of *results*.
The other aspect of Flow is that we accomplish more when we’re “in the zone.” By allowing interruptions, we condemn ourselves to lower productivity and longer hours, just to accomplish the same amount.
My brother is an architect who fully understands the concept of flow: he needs to crank up the music and spend a minimum of 2-3 hours to really do any decent design work. Unfortunately, he also can’t say no to interruptions, and he allows everyone to interrupt him when for any reason at all. The result is that he says he “can’t draw at the office,” and instead goes to work every Saturday. Only then can he get the uninterrupted 2-3 hours he needs.
He’s an extreme case, but how many of us hamstring ourselves with Twitter, email alerts, Blackberry vibrations, etc.?
Just because you can drink beer at 10am doesn’t mean that you should. And just because you can be electronically tethered to everyone in the office all the time doesn’t mean you should.
Good thoughts as usual, Dan. Key idea I’m taking away: just because you *can* doesn’t mean you *should*.
[...] do I waste my time? How can I arrange my time in bigger chunks so I can enjoy longer periods of Flow and get more [...]
[...] talked here before (more than once) about the work of Prof. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. His bestselling book Flow [...]