Achtung! There has been a significant change in your peripheral vision. Your curiosity judges this change monumental enough to break your focus, take command of your motor functions, and haul your line of sight a few degrees to the left. Your eyes settle upon the digital clock, which has just “struck” 12:00. It must have lost power — that can’t be right. Can it? As your mind returns to this world, you realize that you haven’t had dinner or even left your chair for over 6 hours. You then examine the extraordinary amount accomplished during this time and are overrun with feelings of pride and satisfaction.

This is flow. Sometimes described as the feeling of “being in the zone”, flow is a concept first proposed over thirty years ago by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe the mental state of an individual performing an activity in which the following is experienced:

• An intense and focused concentration on the present moment.
• A merging of action and awareness.
• A loss of reflective self-consciousness.
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
• A distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
• An experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding.

I first recognized and identified having this extraordinary experience many years ago while programming — much in the way described at the beginning of this article. I certainly had experienced flow many times prior to this, though without realizing it. Some of the activities that have elevated me to flow include soccer, programming, cycling, mountaineering, and playing guitar. Many of the most incredible moments in my life, moments of total happiness and fulfillment, have been the result of complete, uninterrupted immersion in these pastimes.

Until that epiphanic night, flow was just a seemingly random feeling of exuberance that I would attribute to “having a good day”. For the first time, it crossed my mind that this was actually a higher state of being and that there might be a way to repeatedly reach this place. While we cannot force ourselves into flow, Csikszentmihalyi gives us some conditions that must be met to achieve it.

One must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals. This adds direction and structure to the task. The task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback. This helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows him or her to adjust his or her performance to maintain the flow state. One must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and his or her own perceived skills. One must have confidence that he or she is capable to do the task at hand.

With a description of the location and the guidelines to reach it, why not seek out specific activities with the deliberate goal of reaching flow? Instead of channel surfing through the Ganges River that is cable television, why not learn to paint? Rather than stalk pseudo-friends on Facebook, why not pick up crochet? If you are lucky enough to do something for a living that is conducive to flow, why not do everything in your power to eliminate the obstacles that are keeping you from reaching it?

Get your flow on.

It was 54 paces from the school entrance to my second grade classroom. What was the outcome of that design meeting last week? I am sometimes astonished by the insignificant things I remember. More often, I’m frustrated by the useful things I don’t. I know that the information was once accessible, and maybe it is still buried in my brain somewhere, indefinitely marooned. It’s as if my brain has surreptitiously implemented a self-sabotaging eviction policy.

We can rebuild it. We have the technology. Well, maybe not yet; but we can extend it. Private indexing services such as evernote give us the ability to release the floodgates of information, providing an intuitive interface for future access. I had a brief fling with evernote a few years back. It didn’t work out. Reflecting on that experience, I believe this is because I was so hesitant to expose and relinquish control of my ideas and experiences. Perhaps I was attributing some of my self-worth to my ability to recall anything and everything.

This time, I began with a multi-hour brain dump of everything I could think of. Project ideas, to-do lists, algorithms, birthdays, design patterns, bookmarks, questions, recent meetings, books I’ve read, books I want to read, everything. This was a painful process, but rewards immediately began rolling in as my second brain came to life — accessible via a few keystrokes (or finger-taps). It now grows as my real brain grows. It accumulates important emails, insightful blog articles, meeting notes, route details of mountains I’d like to climb, funny quotes from friends and strangers — pretty much everything I think might ever be worth recalling. It has even instilled new habits. Literature that I feel I’ve taken something meaningful from, I read twice. First, a quick read getting a big picture of the content. Then a much closer read, while taking summarizing notes.

Things are going much better now. My mind feels clear and lean. My resumed command over my past thoughts and experiences leaves me optimistic about my ability to face any challenge.

There are many who lament and object to this application of technology, but it is nothing new. Nostalgia and pride are an expected hurdle in the adoption of technology that (better) performs human tasks. Plato lamented the advent of the written word: “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.” How is it that we can possibly know the thoughts that resided in the brain of a man who died over 2,000 years ago? Oh yah, he wrote them down.