"Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. For a lighter take, watch "Limitless" - because
Surely, there are good reasons to interrupt—high-priority bugs, important calibration meetings, a fire in the building—but it otherwise seemed obvious to me that companies and development teams should work toward optimizing away from distraction and toward focus.
Why are companies hiring developers, after all, if they’re going to distract them from developing?
a developer is facing a problem and is gradually constructing the scaffolding to a solution. Suddenly, a coworker pops in to say, “Hey, so I just sent you an email about that thing,” and the developer’s thought bubble bursts. The coworker walks away whistling while the developer returns to the screen, and the unsolved problem remains—all the progress has evaporated.
Csikszentmihalyi’s initial inspiration was painters who would, he said, “finish a work of art, and instead of enjoying it…put it against the wall and start a new painting.”
many of the people most interested in flow were athletes. After the Dallas Cowboys won the 1993 Super Bowl, for example, the coach, Jimmy Johnson, credited Csikszentmihalyi’s book on flow, saying, “My team has won because of this book.”
Both arts and athletics involve a lot of deft physical movement, and I could see why professionals in those fields would benefit from learning to resist overthinking so they can “just do it.”
But too much emphasis on the feeling of being “in flow” can mean losing sight of what you should actually be doing.
The greatest threat isn’t an external interruption but an internal fragmentation In other words, flow—which is, in its ideal form—a means to productive, creative ends, can turn into an end in itself. A high-priority vulnerability, for example, warrants an interruption. The lost focus is likely a good tradeoff. These “worthy interruptions,” however, extend beyond meetings. One of the core findings in flow state research is that people need more than just focus to get to a flow state. In the illustration below, for example, you can see how only a particular alignment of skills and challenge leads to flow.
The greatest threat isn’t an external interruption but an internal fragmentation In other words, flow—which is, in its ideal form—a means to productive, creative ends, can turn into an end in itself.
people need more than just focus to get to a flow state.
we all need to upgrade our thinking about flow state. In the decades since Csikszentmihalyi’s initial research, there have been dozens of studies on how developers work.
interruptions and distractions; personal barriers, such as the work being too challenging or not challenging enough;
the most disruptive interruptions aren’t external—they’re internal. 81% of the participants predicted internal interruptions would be worse, but they were wrong. “Self-interruptions,” the researchers wrote, “make task switching and interruptions more disruptive by negatively impacting the length of the suspension period and the number of nested interruptions.” These two studies, as well as the dozen or more I read to find these two, give me a theory. There are many barriers to flow, but the worst barriers and the worst interruptions are internal, meaning the development workflow itself needs to improve. The greatest threat isn’t an external interruption but an internal fragmentation—developers allowing themselves to suspend flow state in favor of important but ultimately distracting tasks. Good news: We have more power than we think when it comes to maintaining flow. Bad news: We might need to let our coworkers
the most disruptive interruptions aren’t external—they’re internal. 81% of the participants predicted internal interruptions would be worse, but they were wrong. “Self-interruptions,” the researchers wrote, “make task switching and interruptions more disruptive by negatively impacting the length of the suspension period and the number of nested interruptions.”
The greatest threat isn’t an external interruption but an internal fragmentation—developers allowing themselves to suspend flow state in favor of important but ultimately distracting tasks.
I worried that the popularization of “flow state” amongst developers had resulted in many developers thinking they were doing all they could do by turning off Slack notifications or blocking off their calendars.
sequel study in 2023 focused on nudging found that reflective goal-setting can increase productivity (​​80% agreed that daily reflection helped),
researchers found that developers waste 23% of their working time as a result of technical debt.
