The 'flow' state of performance

I stumbled across this article recently that discusses how athletes can hit the top of their performance and maintain it regardless of the circumstances - in other words, remain in the 'zone'.

What's that zone exactly? I've found numerous definitions so let's start with the one proposed above:

• it is often reported as being comprised of a balance of excitement and awareness, involving deep concentration and full immersion in the activity where athletes exhibit high levels of skill mastery, self-confidence and an automaticity of performance.

And here few other examples:

• Flow in positive psychology, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.
• The “zone” is a state of supreme focus helps athletes in all sports perform at their peak potential. It is when your mind fully connects with achieving a goal, such as getting a hit, or stealing a base. Attention is absorbed into the present (the here and now only). When you’re in the zone your mind only processes the thoughts and images that help you execute your task successfully.
• If you are in the zone, you are happy or excited because you are doing something very skilfully and easily.

Few elements are common among all these definitions:

? Fully present in the moment and laser focus on what's happening and what needs to get done

? Deep concentration, high skill level, high self-confidence

? High success ratio of the task

I tried to remember when it was last time I felt something similar to what's described above. I had few such momments: me playing pool vs a good friend of mine (those who know me know how crazy I am about pool and snooker in general), me and my partner walking by the ocean in Spain, and... getting as much done as possible before my annual leave on my last day.

In all these situations I lost the sense of time, I was fully engaged with the present, and the quality of the efforts on whatever I was doing was much higher, and finally, I felt fully energized and immersed.

I further asked myself what connected all of these situations, and then it occurred to me: emotions. Excitement, anxiety, joyfulness - these are all emotions that I felt at the time. And each emotion was experienced in quite high doses - but, not too high.

From the article it was obvious that emotional control and self-awareness can lead to regularly boosting your performance. While doing my research I noticed this graph that illustrated that point even better:

Arousal basically means how intense the emotion is. What I found particularly interersting about that is there are both positive and negative emotions that can make you hit your flow state:

That explains why I felt in the zone feeling excited, but also nervous and anxious right before my annual leave.

We can then make the assumption that:

? If you don't feel too interested in your work, or you feel too bored in general, the chances are that you're not in your flow state.

Another key component of the flow state that got my attention is lack of distractions, or rather, how difficult it is to return to the flow state after getting distracted. It can take you up to 45 minutes to return to your 'flow'. How come?

Well, constant messages pinging, noise, notifications all around the place, working remotely with your family running around - all these factors are distracting and thus impacting your performance. Constant multitasking and jumping from one task to another do not increase your performance - they decrease your quality and time per task ratios significantly.

It's already been proven that if you dedicate one hour to be fully immersed in your work it's more likely for you to do much more than in several hours multitasking.

This is why we should be aware that our emotions play crucial part in reaching our zone, and if we feel too much stress, or too little, it's simply not good for us.

Subsequently, it's not a prudant idea to avoid all stress at all costs. Feeling slightly nervous will increase your performance rate, more than you may think.

Same goes with positive emotions - feeling too relaxed is not good for your performance. You have to find that sweet spot and feel motivated, but not too pleasant.

?? If you want to be more effective with your time, enter your flow state by eliminating as many distractions as you can, and also by managing the intensity of your both positive and negative emotions so that they're not too high and too low.

Why does it all matter? In this article I demonstrated how lowering time per task can boost an individual's performance and make a difference in finances. If you can get in the zone for just few hours each day, you will get a massively better ratio, with the better quality of your duties on top of it.

Now imagine that not only yourself, but also your company follows the same performance framework - just consider how many business hours gets saved, and how the overall quality of the service/product increases.

These days most internal trainings focus on procedures and ensuring that one understands the company structure. While these areas are important, very little attention is directed towards how things are getting done. Everyone just assumes that you know how to use outlook, salesforce, all other platforms efficiently. I know from my own experience how much I had to learn to use all the functions that can automate a lot of responsibilities.

And what about your soft skills around your own performance? Who showcases how best to approach your duties when there are hundreds of things to do? How best to manage your day while working from home? How to set priorities, plans?

That leads to everyone working in different styles, with no set examples, and that invites randomness to the company functionality.

Even though the notions discussed above apply to sportspeople, I see no reason why these cannot be implemented in HR working environments. The amount of time and money to be saved is worth considering promoting it. How?

?? It's best to start with the changes yourself. Again, we return to my initial comments about ownership - we always need to initiate individually and then promote this mindset shift around.

?? The best way to go about this is not only by sending emails to spread the word (or send a link to this article ??), but by organizing a one-hour weekly meeting with your employees, managers, leaders, key stakeholders to openly discuss how current responsibilities and duties can be performed better.

It should be stressed before that meeting that everyone has to participate with an open mind. The idea here is to openly discuss everything business-related, with set agenda beforehand, so that everyone can have a thought about it. A simple example would be to ask everyone whether they've heard about the 'flow state' and what their emotions are like during the week on average.

Let me stress that again - this meeting must be done regularly with everyone joining and contributing. A lot of habits take longer that one may think to change, and fostering knowledge about the 'zone' and having everyone consider implementing it may take ages. Still, quality growth, and some basic calculations about money saved can make it very worthwhile:

• If there are 5 000 members of your organization, and just one hour gets saved weekly, we're speaking here about thousands of dollars saved.
• Increased response times, and the overall quality of the service. Easy to track in departments where there are ticket systems.

That's all for today! As always, please see two quick examples of strategies and tactics to implement while going about your day:

Strategy:

• Thinking about work instead of working. Follow the 3 minutes rule - instead of thinking how stressful, difficult, overwhelming a task is, set a three minute pomodoro (the app that tracks time or the extention to the browser) and do the work. Most often it will turn out that your mind was playing tricks on you and that worry cost you 10x more than the task itself

Tactics:

• I found hard to start working on massive projects until I realized that they're just dozens of task combined into one. Use spreadsheets to divide all the tasks that need to get done, write them all down in details, assign time references to each, delegate when possible, and set reminders on Mon and Fri to check the progress/chase.

Feel free to share your comments and let me know when did you feel 'in the zone' ??

T.Z