How To Quantify Your Flow States
Finding more flow through self-awareness.
Self-growth through self-knowledge is one of the fundamental beliefs here at Finding Flow.
One of the crucial steps to finding more flow is to learn about this state on a deeper level. To find a way to quantify our Flow States. Not to boast about being better able to experience the flow state than others or to just gather data like an automaton, but to build greater awareness about one’s own flow states and use that to reach higher highs.
How often do you track and reflect on your peak experiences?
If only about 15% of the time a top performer is playing their sport they are in flow, it suggests there’s a lot left on the table for all of our potential.
Quantifying our experiences shows us the way. And I think I’ve found an ideal way to track and understand our flow states on a deeper level. Let me explain.
Experience Scores
The idea of tracking experiences beckons back to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi when he was first defining the peak experience of flow. In his research on subjects from all walks of life, he gave them pagers and would randomly buzz them throughout the day to ask them to record a few questions about what they were doing and how they were feeling in the moment. A person would be stopped in the middle of herding sheep or writing a page in the draft they’re working on to log this info.
I’ve always thought it was rude to interrupt people’s flow states that way but the research did the trick and Mihaly began to understand flow and the conditions much better for the first time. It also set the standard for a new form of data collection that has helped researchers ever since.
Apps can help us do this kind of research into our mindset and state today. The Journal app on iPhones and Apple Watches can send notifications for check in reminders on your mood and state which you can tie in with whatever activity you’re doing at the time to create awareness for yourself around what positively or negatively impacts your mood.
More awareness means more control over your choices for taking action.
What About Fitness Wearables?
When Whoop came out with its stress monitor feature for their fitness tracking band last year I thought it could be a useful technology for predicting flow states. Now Oura and Apple Watch apps are jumping on board with stress monitoring features as well that might be useful for understanding when we’re in flow.
Flow is a demanding state of effort and attention making it also a heightened state of stress. So when these wearables are indicating higher-than-baseline stress in ours days that’s outside of physical activity it could potentially mean flow or it could be just a good ol’ chaotic morning at the office. Because of the stimulating adrenaline and dopamine that’s released when dropping into the flow state, typically heart rate is going to be elevated and HRV is going to go down as we’re driven into a sympathetic state to perform when the pressure’s on. So from a fitness monitor perspective it would look like stress.
I think it’ll be interesting to continue to test and see how wearables will play into understanding our flow states better and helping us to reach more consistent and frequent flow.
What Gets Measured Gets Managed.
In health coaching, we talk about subjective and objective ways to measure health goals and actions taken towards those goals. These can also be qualitative observations or quantitative observations that we can make about our behaviours and actions. While there is no right or wrong choice of data, some data is better than none if you’re trying to make a change. As business consultant Peter Drucker said, “what gets measured gets managed.” Attributing values is also more informative than all-or-none thinking so even if the data is more subjective and qualitative, like a state of mind log, we can still ask, for example, “on a scale from 1-10, how happy are you?”
This allows the client to see incremental progress in their goals and for the coach to have something to help them observe and analyze the results of their action plan together. It also creates additional accountability to work towards the goals.
And we can use measurements such as these to provide the same sort of accountability to ourselves.
In Deep Work, Cal Newport writes about how he would track his deep work sessions as tick marks on a piece of paper. He called it keeping a Compelling Scoreboard. The number of tick marks in a row was a running tally of his hours spent in deep work, a visible marker to the progress of projects that could often take weeks or months.
Deep Work sessions are delineated by clear time blocks and so a tick mark can work to simply measure each hour spent in deep work. It also follows simple rules of deliberate practice, focusing on a single task, and having no distractions to the task at hand.
But what happens when things aren’t so clear like in flow states?
I’ve talked before about how in Flow Time, it shouldn’t be cut short just because your Pomodoro timer goes off or your deep work block is over. To end flow early is antithetical to the experience. There are also more nuances to the richness and depth of the experience of flow. Some flow states coming from our primary flow activities are experienced with more of the conditions of flow than a secondary activity that will still get you in the zone and feel great but may not have the same high to it.
So if this idea of better understand your flow states is at all interesting to you, I’ve put together something I think that you’ll like.
The Flow Hackers Handbook
I feel like I’m one of the odd ones out that obsesses over flow states to the point of being very good at translating them from one activity to another in my life. By learning to reflect on what flow feels like, the subtle cues get picked up in other activities from your primary flow state leading to a high flow lifestyle. But I don’t think this is commonplace even for most high performers.
Yet.
The Flow Hackers Handbook will help you to journal on your experiences of flow, build awareness around the conditions that you experience most frequently, and test new flow triggers to push your peak flow states even further.
There are 3 main elements to the Flow Hacker Handbook that I think you’ll really like if you’re anywhere close to as obsessed with performing your best as I am.
Flow State Tracker
A journal of your flow state experiences that allows you to check off each flow condition that was a part of the experience as well as space for field notes on each of the conditions and any flow triggers you noticed or tested out as part of the experience.
Along with the logbook to track your experience of flow each day The Tracker includes a weekly view, monthly log, and streaks tracker where you can see which conditions of flow you experience the most, bringing the awareness of how you experience your flow states to a new level.
There’s also a beautifully clear graph that presents the depth of each of your flow experiences over time, helping you to see the progress of how many conditions of flow you’re building up with each consecutive state.
Flow Triggers Library
An expansive library of examples and actions to help you activate each of the flow triggers. Use this to generate new ideas for finding and triggering flow states and to deepen your understanding of how the best in the world trigger flow.
In behaviour change psychology we choose and test a next action as part of the process of goal setting. By having the library of flow triggers at your fingers, you can sort through what would be best in your situation to test by yourself or for group flow to help access the enhanced productivity and creativity of the flow state. It’s like being at the control panel of a rocket being launched and knowing the right buttons to push for blast off.
Flow Conditions Checklist
An important part of finding more flow is building awareness and knowledge of the state itself. The conditions checklist also helps you deepen your knowledge of the inner workings of the flow state and in turn, apply that to a richer opportunity to reflect on and quantify your flow states with the Flow State Tracker.
Knowing the conditions of flow is like having a flashing sign that will tell you when you’re in alignment with one of the conditions or not. Hitting more of the conditions while in flow is likely to bring you to a higher peak of flow state and increase your performance further. I don’t yet know if all conditions of flow should be weighted equally in quantifying flow states. I know what conditions I tend to experience more than others but I won’t make a value judgement on any of the conditions for you. I also don’t think it’s necessary to do that for our flow tracker to provide the value of knowing you’re on the right track to deeper flow states by observing and measuring your conditions and testing out new triggers with your flow experiences.
I’m really excited to be working on creating this tool for you to use.
The best part is, I’m giving it away for free (at least for now).
If you want to get early access - check it out here.
Take Action
Your actions for this week are simple: set up your copy of the Handbook and get curious about making your own observations as you experience flow.
That's awesome RJ, cool to see you put the product together!