The pager went off at random, once in every two-hour stretch between 7:30 in the morning and 10:30 at night. Seven times a day for a week, the person carrying it stopped, opened a booklet and spent a minute or two on one page: what they were doing, how challenging it was, how skilled they felt at it, how happy, how creative, how relaxed. One line asked: “Did you wish you had been doing something else?”
The carriers worked at five large companies in the Chicago area: managers and engineers, clerical staff, blue-collar workers. The study was presented at company assemblies to 1,026 workers, and 44% volunteered. The researchers picked 139, and 107 completed the week. Together they filled in 4,791 pages, 99% of them within 20 minutes of the beep.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Judith LeFevre wanted to know where people’s best moments came from. Since the Greeks, they noted, interest in leisure had rested on the assumption that free time is the source of the most rewarding experiences in life. They counted a moment as flow when a person rated both the challenge and their own skill above their personal average for the week, a definition they themselves called “very liberal.”
For the 78 workers with enough reports to compare, the answer ran the other way. “Contrary to expectations,” as the paper put it, flow-like moments came more than three times as often at work: 54% of work reports, 17% of leisure ones. Managers were in flow in 64% of their work reports, clerical workers in 51%, blue-collar workers in 47%. In free time, the biggest source of flow for all three groups was driving, which the researchers had not even counted as leisure.
Then they looked at the line about wishing to be elsewhere. At work, people wished more strongly that they were doing something else. Leisure scored higher on motivation, even in leisure moments that were not flow.
The authors called it a paradoxical situation. “Apparently, the obligatory nature of work masks the positive experience it engenders,” they wrote. “In deciding whether they wish to work or not, people judge their desires by social conventions rather than by the reality of their feelings.” They weighed the idea that people simply needed to recover from tiring work, and doubted it, pointing to farmers in some traditional communities who worked from dawn to dusk and still spent their free time weaving, carving or playing music.
Not everyone accepted that explanation. In a study published online in 2014, Stefan Engeser and Nicola Baumann of the University of Trier pointed out that flow had been inferred from challenge and skill rather than measured. They had 100 employees answer seven signals a day for a week, 4,504 measurements in all, and asked about flow directly. Flow was still highest at work. But leisure scored better in other ways: people felt less tense and nervous in leisure than at work, and happier in active leisure.
People at work who said they would rather be doing something else, Engeser and Baumann suggested, might have had something specific in mind: making music, painting, gardening.