The Flow State: How Progress Drives Peak Performance

The state of flow is often described as an optimal and deeply engaging experience. When people enter this state, they can work on a task for hours, fully immersed and focused. They forget about everything else—their surroundings, their worries—and stay entirely in the moment. This allows them to perform at their personal best.

In flow, individuals often feel a sense of fluidity and momentum, moving effortlessly from one step to the next. It's like riding the current of a river, where attention and action flow together seamlessly.

The Skill-Challenge Balance

One of the key ingredients for achieving flow is finding the right balance between the challenge of the task and the individual’s skill level. Flow is most likely to occur when the task is challenging enough to be stimulating but still within reach of the person’s abilities.

This balance, however, isn’t always easy to maintain. Predicting when flow will happen can be tricky because it depends on both the task and the person, making it a non-linear relationship.

The Role of Progress in Flow

In this study, researchers explore a key question: Is making progress essential for achieving flow? They suggest that flow is closely tied to the feeling of progress throughout a task.

Progress means moving towards a goal, often reflected in changes in performance. The "progress-driven motivation theory" explains that we’re naturally motivated to take actions that help us feel like we’re moving forward. Technically, this is about reducing "prediction errors," which occur when there’s a gap between what we expect and what actually happens. Successfully reducing those errors gives us a sense of accomplishment, which is rewarding and keeps us engaged.

This theory also fits well with the idea of finding the optimal challenge. If a task is too easy or too hard, it’s difficult to make progress. With easy tasks, we may do well right from the start, but because there’s little room to improve, we quickly lose interest. On the other hand, if the task is too difficult, progress becomes almost impossible, leading to frustration and disengagement.

In contrast, tasks that are moderately challenging offer room to learn, improve, and experience both ups and downs in performance. These moments of progress can motivate us to stick with the task.

Discovering Progress Niches

The study also introduces the concept of "progress niches"—episodes within a task that offer the best opportunities for progress. After each session, participants rated their progress niche by answering, “Do I feel there’s still room to refine my performance?” on a 7-point scale.

Progress niches aren’t static. At first, there may be plenty of progress to make, but as people get better at the task, progress slows down. If no new progress niches are found, people may lose interest and disengage. This is when people can hit a “progress plateau”—they stop improving and may even lose their passion for the task.

However, if a new progress niche is discovered, it can reignite the flow experience. Finding new strategies or overcoming performance obstacles can make the task enjoyable again.

In everyday work, people often develop ways to break through these plateaus. For instance, when dealing with repetitive tasks, they might find creative or playful ways to re-engage with their work and reignite progress.

The Impact of a Small Change

One fascinating part of the study involved an experiment where researchers gave participants an extra 10 seconds to complete their tasks—without them knowing it. This small change significantly improved their performance and flow experience. Even when the tasks returned to their usual time limit, those in the intervention group showed higher peak performance. This highlights the powerful role of perceived progress in maintaining flow.

Key Findings

• The perception of progress and actual progress are key to experiencing flow during knowledge work.
• Both flow and the perception of progress tend to decrease over time with a given task. This is consistent with previous research showing that people are motivated by the possibility of learning something new.
• Flow dynamics are influenced by actual progress and the perception of progress niches, with actual progress serving as a bridge between perceived progress and flow.
• Even when flow and progress perceptions decline, task performance can remain steady, suggesting that performance can be maintained without high levels of flow.
• Interventions that help individuals see more progress opportunities, like allowing extra time, can improve both their experience of flow and their performance.

These findings show how critical our perceptions are to staying engaged in tasks. It’s not just about what we’re doing, but how we feel about our ability to make progress.

Flow and Information

The idea tested in this study highlights the central role of progress, aligning well with the recently proposed "informational theory of flow." This theory suggests that flow occurs when there is a narrow gap between the individual's current abilities and the complexity of the task at hand. This gap is measured by the conditional information exchanged between the two—essentially, the feedback or clues the task provides as the person works through it. The informational theory suggests that when tasks offer clear, low-conditional information (meaning the requirements and steps to complete the task are well understood and within reach), people are more likely to experience flow.

What sets this theory apart is that it views flow from the perspective of the task itself. The more a task offers understandable, actionable feedback, the easier it becomes to stay in flow. However, while the theory provides valuable insights into how tasks can induce flow, it doesn't delve as deeply into the specific psychological mechanisms that sustain it.

Traditionally, researchers in lab settings manipulate task difficulty to study how it affects the flow experience. But perceptions of difficulty are shaped not only by objective factors like task complexity but also by subjective elements such as the individual's skill level, motivation, and prior experiences. This is often referred to as the person’s "required knowledge" for the task. In real-world scenarios, individuals often have limited control over task difficulty. As they progress, they must adapt to shifting challenges, making the flow experience more dynamic and fluid. Studying flow in this context, as opposed to static laboratory conditions, provides a richer, more realistic understanding of how people experience it during everyday tasks.

Bridging Flow and Progress

When viewed through the lens of the progress-driven flow theory, this dynamic becomes clearer. Tasks that provide low-conditional information help individuals better understand how their efforts contribute to achieving their goals. This clear feedback creates a strong sense of progress, which in turn gives rise to flow. Imagine a dart-throwing game: if the player gets immediate feedback about how close their dart lands to the bullseye, they can adjust and improve their aim, even with small progress steps. This precise feedback helps the player experience a sense of ongoing progress. In contrast, if they only get feedback about whether they hit or missed the target, the path to improvement becomes unclear, leading to frustration and disengagement.

The combination of progress-driven flow theory and informational theory offers a deeper, more detailed understanding of how flow is achieved. While progress-driven flow focuses on the psychological experience of progress, informational theory emphasizes the task’s structure and feedback system. Together, they form a comprehensive view: flow thrives when tasks offer both the right amount of challenge and clear feedback that enables continuous progress.

The Concept of Expected Information Gain

The concept of "expected information gain" is closely related to the idea of a "progress niche." Both describe how individuals perceive opportunities for improvement or learning within a task. As people continue to explore and work on a specific activity, the amount of new information (or progress) they gain gradually decreases. This decline makes it harder to stay motivated, as the sense of progress weakens over time.

In practice, this means that tasks or activities need to offer continual opportunities for learning or improvement—whether through feedback, new challenges, or skill development—to keep people engaged and in flow. Without these new opportunities, the motivational pull weakens, and flow becomes harder to sustain.

Conclusion

In understanding flow, both the progress-driven and informational theories provide valuable insights into what keeps us engaged and performing at our best. Progress, whether perceived or tangible, plays a critical role in maintaining flow, while clear and actionable feedback from tasks allows us to stay connected to our goals. By balancing challenge with skill, and ensuring a continuous sense of progress, we can foster flow more effectively. These findings offer not only theoretical understanding but practical strategies for sustaining motivation and peak performance in both personal and professional settings.

Works cited:

Lu, H., van der Linden, D., & Bakker, A. B. (2024, June 14). Progress as a pathway to the peak experience of flow. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/stbh6