So if your phone is right beside you, you’re wasting precious attention energy on ignoring it. You might not realise it, but your mind is actively involved in ignoring potential distractors. Help yourself by leaving your phone in another room. You need to actively practise to be able to focus all your attention on the present moment.įurthermore, it’s essential to avoid distractionsand multitasking at all costs. Purpose is not enough to find attention, though. Just choose activities that don’t want to make you check your phone every other minute. One thing you could do to benefit from a longer attention span is to focus on something of interest. Without your undivided attention, it’s hard to tap into flow. Don’t like your job? Try to think of the people you might be helping by doing it.
Without purpose, it’s difficult to give something your full attention, so try to find purpose in whatever you do. If you go around the corner in a first-person shooter, you don’t think, you just click the button and your war hero immediately fires his weapon. Every action has a consequence that immediately guides you into taking the next step. When playing e-sports, for example, every click leads to something and every action caused by that click leads to new information. Every move leads to an immediate reply from your opponent or the environment. Immediate feedback is very present in several sports. It’s an ongoing circle of action and reaction. The name of the first trigger speaks for itself. Actions and tasks with immediate feedback lead to a smooth-flowing process because there’s no need to stop and think about results and what to do next. These triggers are influenced by your emotions and how you deal with them. The psychological flow triggers are having clear goals, receiving immediate feedback, ‘working’ with highly focused attention and a perfect skill-challenge balance. Tip 1: Choose a psychological flow trigger So, if you pick just one flow state trigger from each category and practise it, you will become a lot better at finding flow on a regular basis. The triggers are divided into four categories: psychological, social, environmental and creative triggers. By focusing on just 4 triggers they managed a 30-80% increase in flow. Steven Kotler, a leading expert on flow, did a study with Google employees. Of course, you don’t need all triggers to tap into flow. In this article, we’ll focus on the individual ones. Flow experts identify between 17 and 20 triggers. About half are individual triggers and others are group triggers. They are pre-conditions that can generate more flow. Flow state triggers don’t just trigger flow by themselves. Check out the infographic at the bottom for a quick glance at the flow triggers. Short on time? For the key points about flow state triggers, stick to the bold text and the conclusion.