Achieving Excellence Through Flow

Disruptions to Flow

The biggest problem with the state of flow is that it is both difficult to achieve and very fragile. Even the slightest distraction can disrupt the state of flow.

While the ability to achieve flow is extremely valuable in our professional life, interruptions and distractions are frequently looming when we’re surrounded by the people with whom we work. The office din, phone calls, email notifications, conversations with team members, context switching, or our own desire to multitask can disrupt a productive state of flow.

Multitasking

Attempting to handle several tasks at once is one of the main culprits sabotaging flow and is often the root cause of our needing to work overtime.

A great example of multitasking occurs when a project manager is planning the next stage of work whose status will shift to in progress. In addition to planning future work, she needs to monitor the progress of her team’s current work, provide status reports to her managers, approve design specifications, and so on. So she may start planning, then soon afterward, decide to check on the team; an hour later, prepare a status report for the product manager; then, consider design options. Over several days, she may repeat this juggling of tasks over and over again, without making any significant progress on planning. Eventually, as the launch date of the next phase draws near, her work becomes tougher to manage under the burden of incomplete work on her various tasks.

Multitasking is a bad habit that seems to create the illusion that, by doing a number of things at once, we can complete our work faster, then move on to the next big thing. Unfortunately, in most cases, multitasking actually results in mediocre performance and long task cycle times.

According to a study that the University of London conducted, frequent multitasking actually has the potential to lower a person’s IQ and decrease cognitive capacity by up to 15 points. Multitasking can even cause permanent brain damage because it affects brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex—the region of the brain that is responsible for empathy, as well as cognitive and emotional control.

To illustrate the dangers of multitasking, you can try a multitasking game for agile teams with your colleagues in the office. This takes just ten minutes and clearly demonstrates the difference in performance when your team does just one thing at a time versus trying to multitask.

Context Switching

Switching tasks too often also has adverse effects on the quality and speed of our work. Even when we avoid multitasking, we still need to switch contexts from time to time—often because our tasks have different levels of priority. When we’re in flow, an urgent matter may demand our immediate attention so we must deal with it. Each time we switch contexts, we lower our productivity.

A great example of an involuntary context switch occurs when a developer working on a new feature must stop working on it to fix a bug in the deployed code. She needs to shift her focus to debugging, then when she completes that task, return to coding the new feature. As she tries to reacclimatize herself to that work, the speed at which she is able to continue coding is much slower than it was when she was in a state of flow.

In flow, the developer had built momentum by focusing on one activity and accumulated more and more information that was pertinent to her work. However, when the developer switched contexts, she lost some of that momentum. After returning to her previous task, some of that information was no longer top of mind and getting back to where she had been took some time and had a cognitive cost.

Achieving Team Flow

If the key to being as effective as possible and completing work in the shortest amount of time is getting into flow, wouldn’t it make sense to turn the different parts of our work process into one well-structured flow?

As markets have become ever more competitive, the number of Project Managers who are thinking in terms of flow has been increasing steadily over the years. This has led to the rise of Kanban, lean software development, and agile development. Although lean manufacturing, which originated at Toyota, has been around for more than half of a century, lean has more recently become popular in knowledge work. Lean software development aims to transform what can be a somewhat chaotic work process into a steady, well-structured workflow and break down complicated tasks into easy-to-process chunks that gather speed over time. The goal is to remove all wasteful activities from the process.

Minimizing Communication Disruptions

However, even when we structure our work process into a flow, our focus may still be disrupted by what’s going on around us. The channels of communication a team chooses to employ can make the difference between frequent or rare interruptions. Two modes of communication are in common use in the workplace:

• synchronous—In synchronous communication, two or more people participate a conversation in real time, resulting in a continuous, back-and-forth flow of information. Examples include face-to-face conversations, phone calls, and video conferencing.
• asynchronous—In asynchronous communication, a sender can communicate a message at any time, without connecting directly with one or more recipients. Recipients receive messages and can attend to them whenever it is convenient for them. Email messages are an asynchronous form of communication.

Text messages and Skype messages can be either synchronous or asynchronous, depending on when a recipient receives them.

Neither of these modes of communication is perfect. By adopting an appropriate combination of synchronous and asynchronous communication, a team can strike an optimal balance. For example, a team member could start by sending asynchronous messages to communicate matters that do not require recipients’ immediate attention; then, if recipients don’t answer in a reasonable amount of time, communicate with them directly.

You can also try to handle synchronous communications at opportune moments. For example, when you see that a teammate is currently out of flow, you can discuss what you need to communicate in a few minutes, then both of you can return to flow.

Making the Work Environment Conducive to Flow

A common condition for entering flow is seclusion. However, no matter how spacious your workplace might be, it is rare for a company to provide an individual office for each employee. The cubicles that are common in many companies aim to solve this problem, but, more often than not, do more harm than good. While they may create the illusion of privacy, they provide no barrier to ambient sound, so the surrounding din is still a problem for people trying to get into flow. Another problem cubicles present is an inability to see your teammates and the resulting lack of awareness of what they’re currently doing. So you don’t know whether your beginning a conversation would disrupt their state of flow.

Noise suppression is another tactic people often use to achieve and sustain flow because it creates a feeling of privacy. The most common approach is using headphones. However, listening to music can fairly easily affect one’s ability to get into flow. It may either help you to get into flow and remain in flow longer or intermittently disrupt your state of flow. This varies from one person to another. For some, listening to music makes it impossible to focus on the task at hand because it draws their attention away, while, for others, music helps them focus by eliminating distracting noise.

Studies of whether music helps people focus have shown contradictory results. According to a study by Wake Forest School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina Greensboro, music can improve a person’s focus, but only if it suits the listener’s taste and the task at hand.

For people seeking a quiet space in which to think, noise-canceling headphones may be an option. However, they dampen only continuous sources of noise like an airplane’s engines, not intermittent sounds or conversations.

Conclusion

Being mentally exhausted also prevents us from focusing and getting into flow. Occupational burnout is a serious problem at most companies and does significant damage to both individual employees and the organization to which they belong. So taking occasional breaks and having days off are just as important to our productivity.

Being in a state of flow turns our work into a pleasure and increases our efficiency. To enable a team to perform at the peak of their ability, everyone on the team needs to learn how to get into flow more quickly, then protect that flow state. Hopefully, this article has made you aware of the importance of maintaining a state of flow, provided some tips that will help you and your team get into flow, and enabled you to achieve success through higher productivity.