Flow
I’ve been doing some reading up on the concept of Flow. At first I thought it was pseudoscience but it turns out that it’s actually a pretty established theory.
I’ve instated a period of time each day which I refer to as “Focus O’Clock.” It’s when I hunker down, put up an away message, close all extraneous browsers, put on headphones to a repetitive song, and climb down my tunnel of focus. So far it’s been working well.
There’s some really good stuff at the bottom of this page, especially the “Solving Procrastination” concept at the bottom. This short two-page paper explains that you should stagger your tasks in such a way that you’re working on the hardest tasks when you’re deepest in focus, which is when you’re at the height of your game.
I’ve frequently been “Flowing” (haha) in gaming, the state exists there, for sure. Times off the top of my head have been during particularly awesome arena matches when playing WoW, or intense battles in RTS games, where you just seem to do everything right. Flow is obviously an important concept in gaming, but particularly interesting to me because I think casual gaming deals with Flow differently. Play sessions tend to be shorter, so the user might not get as ‘deeply’ into the game. I wonder if that’s why they are casual, or if it’s a bad thing and we should make our games more focus-able?