Flow channel
What it is for
Use it when a day leaves you tired with nothing produced. Putting activities on two axes shows at once which ones bore you because you are too good for what they ask, and which grind you down because they ask more than you can do today. The first get delegated or automated, the second get broken up or learned.
Activities
1
Anxiety
1
Flow
1
Boredom
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The channel is not a line but a band, and it moves: what was the right challenge a year ago is boredom today, because you got better in the meantime. That is why work that stays identical stops working even when it was fine at the start. The way out of boredom is raising the challenge, not changing jobs.
Frequently asked questions
How to use this model
What exactly does "flow" mean?
It is the state Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described in 1975: complete absorption in what you are doing, with time passing differently and no effort spent holding your attention. It is not a synonym for enjoyment or for productivity: you can be productive while bored and enjoy something very easy.
What are the 1 to 10 scores based on?
On your own perception, and that is fine: the model is about the distance between how hard it feels and how capable you feel, not an objective measure. Two people on the same task will score it differently, and that is exactly the point.
What if everything lands in anxiety?
It usually means the activities are written too large. "Prepare the accounts" is a project, not a task: broken into five smaller lines, three land in the channel and two stay hard. If they stay hard even then, the answer is that a skill is missing, and skills get learned or bought.
What is the flow channel?
It is the band where the difficulty of a task and the skill of the person doing it are close to each other. Above the band comes anxiety, because the task asks more than you can give; below it comes boredom.
How should I score from 0 to 10?
By feel, and that is right: the model is about the gap between how hard something feels and how capable you feel, not about an objective measure. Two people score the same task differently, and that is the interesting part.
What do I do with the activities that land in boredom?
They are the natural candidates for delegating or automating: they cost you time and teach you nothing. If they cannot be moved, the other way out is to raise the challenge, say by doing them in half the time.