The pager could go off at any moment in a two-hour window, seven times a day, from 7:30 in the morning to 10:30 at night. Whoever carried it, a manager, a clerk or a blue-collar worker, took out a booklet and filled in one page. What are you doing? How challenging is it? How skilled are you at it? And one more line: “Did you wish you had been doing something else?”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Judith LeFevre of the University of Chicago ran this for a week with workers from five large companies around Chicago, and published the results in 1989. They were testing an assumption that, as they noted, goes back to the Greeks: that free time is where the most rewarding experiences in life are found.
The pages said otherwise. In the reports of 78 workers, moments of high challenge met by high skill, by the study’s measure, turned up in 54% of work reports and 17% of leisure reports. Even blue-collar workers were in this state in 47% of their work reports. And yet, page after page, it was at work that people wished more strongly to be somewhere else.
Hard, but possible
Csikszentmihalyi had named the state years before, after interviewing artists and scientists about why they did work that often brought neither fame nor money. A composer told him that when composing went well, the music “just flows out.” So many people described something like that, he said in a 2004 TED talk, that he called it the flow experience.
In the talk he listed what people report while in it, across cultures. Intense focus. Knowing exactly what you want to do from one moment to the next. Immediate feedback. A sense that the task is possible, “even though difficult.” Time disappearing. Forgetting yourself.
The engine is the match between challenge and skill. In the model, when the challenge outruns your skill you get anxious; when it falls short, bored; when both are low, apathetic. A tennis rally against someone slightly better than you can swallow an hour. Against a beginner you drift.
Absorption tends to come when a task is hard but doable and shows you how you’re doing.
So why did work beat leisure in the 1989 data? The authors’ reading was that outside work, “a feeling of using one’s skills in a challenging situation is difficult to achieve.” The largest single component of leisure in the study was watching television, and in the authors’ view, the shortage of flow in free time was more likely due to an “inability to organize one’s psychic energy in unstructured free time” than to tiredness. The biggest source of flow outside work, for all three job groups, was driving a car.
A beeper instead of a memory
The pagers were the point. Diaries and questionnaires ask people to remember, the authors argued, and memory misses the subtle and contradictory parts of a moment, while cultural ideas about an activity can bend the account. Sampling at random catches the moment itself; 99% of the pages came back within 20 minutes of a beep. Csikszentmihalyi’s group called it the experience sampling method.
It also carried a generous definition. Anyone who rated both challenge and skill above their own weekly average was counted as in flow, which the authors called “very liberal.” Their proportions were meant to show “the direction of a trend,” they wrote, “not to be taken literally”; extremely intense flow probably comes “at best only a few times in a lifetime.”
Stefan Engeser and Nicola Baumann raised a sharper objection: flow had been inferred, not measured. In a study published online in 2014, they asked 100 employees about flow directly, seven times a day for a week. Flow was still highest at work. But leisure was calmer, and active leisure happier, which they argued offers a credible explanation for the wish to be elsewhere.
Absorbed is not the same as effective
Flow is often linked to high performance. A meta-analysis of 22 studies in sport and computer gaming, published in 2021, found a medium-sized relationship between flow and performance (r = 0.31). The authors concluded that current evidence can’t tell which way it runs. It could be that playing well brings on flow, rather than the reverse.
Nor is flow the same as feeling good. Engeser and Baumann note that joy may not be felt during flow itself, often only afterward, and point to a 2012 argument, backed by cortisol data, that flow shares some central aspects with stress.
Password resets and migrations
Say Arjun works in technical support. Most of his day is password resets he could do half asleep. Once a month a database migration lands on him that is beyond his skill, and he dreads it. His days swing between boredom and anxiety. His manager could give him a slightly larger piece of each migration, with a senior engineer reviewing it the same day, so the challenge climbs with his skill and the feedback arrives fast. More of his hours might land where both are high. That wouldn’t guarantee faster work, and if the 1989 data are any guide, he might still wish he were somewhere else.
Engeser and Baumann also tested whether flow at work lifted people’s mood in the leisure that followed. They found no support for it in their data. One idea they proposed for future work: flow on a workday might pay off after hours only when it moved a meaningful project forward, the core of the progress principle.