What is Flow?
When was the last time you were in flow? Likely, you know what I mean by that question, but if asked, could you define flow?
Ask 100 people, and you’ll likely hear 100 interpretations. But I’d bet that most would include something about time, specifically losing track of it.
Yet flow cannot be found in time.
Because flow cannot tell time. It reads no clocks. It doesn’t keep a calendar. It doesn’t care about the day of the week. It doesn’t magically show up on January 1st, the start of the month, or on Monday morning.
In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s 1990 seminal work on the subject, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he defines it as:
The state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.
His definition includes the concepts of enjoyment, immersion, and interestingly, effort, but not time. Csikszentmihalyi does get into time in relation to flow, but less as a defining characteristic and more on how flow exists outside of its normal conventions.
The safest generalization to make about this phenomenon is to say that during the flow experience, the sense of time bears little relation to the passage of time as measured by the absolute convention of the clock.
Because time is an absolute, while flow is a feeling. And feelings can have varying degrees of intensity that do not fit within the...
