Flow: when time disappears, and how to find that state more often

You sit down to fix one small thing in a drawing, a piece of code or a song, look up, and two hours have gone. You did not check your phone and you did not feel tired. Afterwards you feel good in a quiet way that is hard to explain.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this state flow. Our Flow State Questionnaire asks how often one activity in your life brings you close to it.

Where the idea comes from

Csikszentmihalyi started by interviewing people who spent long hours on activities that brought them no money or fame: rock climbers, chess players, dancers, composers. In his 1975 book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety he described what they had in common. They were fully absorbed, they knew what to do next, they lost track of time and they stopped worrying about how they looked to others. His 1990 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience brought the idea to a wide audience.

To study flow in daily life, Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues used the experience sampling method. People carried pagers that beeped at random moments, and at each beep they noted what they were doing and how they felt. In 1989 Csikszentmihalyi and Judith LeFevre reported a result that surprised many readers. People were in flow more often at work than in their free time, even though they said they would rather be doing something else.

Challenge and skill

Flow appears when a task is hard enough to need your full attention but not so hard that you cannot keep up. When the challenge is far above your skill, you feel anxious. When it is far below, you get bored. When both are low, you are more likely to feel apathy than flow.

This is the part of flow you can change most easily. A task that bores you can be made harder (a time limit, a stricter standard, a new technique), and a task that overwhelms you can be split into smaller steps or done with help.

What our test asks

The questionnaire has nine statements in three parts: Absorption, Enjoyment and Challenge-Skill Balance, three statements each. You rate each one on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

Examples are "When doing this activity, I lose all sense of time." and "My actions feel automatic, as though they happen without conscious effort." for absorption, and "This activity is challenging enough to keep me engaged, but not so hard that it overwhelms me." for balance.

The statements refer to "this activity", but the test does not name one. Before you start, choose one activity, such as your main work task, a sport or an instrument, and answer every statement about that one. If you think of different things for different statements, the result will be hard to read.

In 1996 Susan Jackson and Herbert Marsh published the Flow State Scale, a longer questionnaire that covers nine parts of flow. Our version is not that scale. We wrote the nine statements ourselves, based on Csikszentmihalyi's description of flow, so this is a self-reflection tool, not a validated questionnaire. All nine are worded in the same direction, with no reverse-scored items.

How to read your scores

A high Enjoyment score with a low Balance score often means you like the activity but it is currently too easy or too hard. Adjust the level before deciding the activity is wrong for you. Low Absorption with good Balance often points to interruptions. Notifications and open tabs break the long stretches of attention that flow needs.

You can take the test again for a different activity and compare. If you want to know how engaged you are in your job as a whole, try the Work Engagement Test, and read why doing something for its own sake works differently from doing it for a reward.