Challenging the Supremacy of Flow State

I’ve long thought that the ability to maintain flow state for hours was the hallmark of a good programmer. I prided myself on being in such a deep state of flow that I would often fail to notice the passing of hours, the setting sun. I would often only reluctantly step away to pee. I would work late into the night, uninterrupted by the world.

As the systems I’ve worked on have become more complex, technologically diverse, and frankly riddled with errors, I’ve realized that what I thought of as “flow” is actually just a state of chasing my own thoughts, trying to immediately fix whatever annoyances or weirdnesses I encounterd, and finishing my days not having completed my initial goals for the day.

The truth is, while I may have been in a state free of self, I was not in a state of focus. I was exhibiting a state of mixed hyperfocus and also hyper-distractability, but it felt like the “flow” I had come to believe was a supreme virtue.

This eventually caught up with me. Expectations on my teams are high, and I was getting behind, overhwelmed by my actual worklaod and yet never seeming to make progress on it, despite doing lots of things, uninterrupted, all day every day.

Sometimes I need a crisis to preciptate change, and that’s what I found myself with. Forced to make a change, either find a new career or find a way to accomplish the things I said I would accomplish, I began to realize that I need to increase focus. I decided, after years of dismissing it, to give Pomodoro an earnest shot. I had resisted this for years because I thought that the 25 minutes work/5 minutes break would upset my flow.

What I found was the contrary. I realized that by treating 25 (now 37) minutes as an absolute atomic unit of time dedicated to a single task, I was able to get more done. I also came to the realization that even within a pomodoro, my attention would broaden, my task-focus would diminish, and that longer pomodoros (I stopped experimenting at the 70 minute mark) were just chaos by the end.

So now instead of trying to maximize flow, I am seeking to maximize focus. Each new pomodoro (and indeed, every breath) is an opportunity to begin again and come back to the object of my attention, whatever it may be.

(if this sounds like meditation speak, it is, and work is a perfectly appropriate application of the idea)