Flow does not require an empty room

Thursday night, five a side, and you are not especially good at it. An hour later you could not report a single thing you thought about during the game, because you did not think about anything. You played.

That is the state most productivity writing is trying to sell you. And almost every page selling it would have told you to do it alone, in a quiet room, with the door shut.

The advice converges on an empty room

Search for how to reach a flow state and the picture is remarkably consistent. Notifications off. A tidy desk. Tell people not to interrupt you. One person, one screen, one closed door.

That route is real and it works. It is also one route, and it has been described so often that it now reads as the definition rather than as an example.

The research underneath it never said flow needed an empty room. That is an accident of who the advice was written for.

What the group flow research actually says

In 2018, Fabian Pels, Jens Kleinert and Florian Mennigen published a scoping review in PLOS ONE, working through 26 publications on flow in groups under PRISMA guidelines. They open by summarising what the wider literature had already settled, and it is the part worth having.

... the experience of individual flow is not restricted to solitary behavior and that it can also occur in social situations.

Then they do something most writing on this skips. They say what "with other people" actually means, and it turns out to be two quite different arrangements rather than one.

Social situations, they write, range from ones in which persons attend to individual tasks with others merely being present, to ones with highly interdependent tasks wherein others form an integral part of task accomplishment.

That is a spectrum, not a switch. At one end is the cafe, where the people around you are scenery. At the other is the band, where the others are the task.

Both count, and they are not interchangeable.

The low end is the one you already use

Working in a cafe, reading in a park, the gym at six. Other people are present and none of them is part of what you are doing.

This costs you nothing in coordination, which is why it is the easiest version to arrange. In the recreational physical activity research the review cites, individual flow was found to occur slightly more often with a co-participant than alone.

Slightly. That is the honest size of it, and it is worth noticing how modest the real finding is next to how confidently the internet talks about accountability partners.

The high end changes the arithmetic

When the others are genuinely part of the task, something structural changes. In ordinary individual flow there is a balance between your challenges and your skills. The review's account of group flow is that the balance additionally includes all group members.

That single line explains a lot of frustrating evenings.

You can turn up with your own challenge and skill matched perfectly and still have a bad game, because the group's balance is wrong. The other team is far better. Your bandmate has not practised. The tempo is beyond one person and beneath another. Nothing is wrong with you, and the usual conclusion, that you were not focused enough, is not the right explanation for the day.

A shared activity has a difficulty setting that nobody in it controls alone.

Company can also make it worse, and the research says so

This is where most articles would tell you that doing it together is simply better. The literature does not.

Summarising the older social psychology, Walker notes that group contexts introduce variables that cause people to act, think and feel differently than they do alone, and that these differences may inhibit, facilitate, or transform flow experiences.

Inhibit is first in that list for a reason. Being watched while you are bad at something is not a flow condition. Neither is a group where somebody has to be managed, or one where you are the person carrying it.

The other honest thing to say is that this field is young. The same review found thirteen different terms in use for group flow across the literature, and it closes by saying a systematic research programme on the topic is still needed. Nobody should be selling you a protocol built on it.

What actually turns up when you ask people

The most useful data here is plain. Tímea Magyaródi and Attila Oláh surveyed 1,709 Hungarian adults for Europe's Journal of Psychology in 2015, asking each of them to name the activity in their own life that most typically produced the experience, once for solitary situations and once for social ones.

The most typical solitary flow activities were work, sports, creative activities and reading. The most common social ones were work and sports.

Work is top of both lists, which is its own uncomfortable finding and one the archive has been round before. But the shape of the social list is the useful part. Sport, and work with other people. Things with a score, a finish and somebody depending on you.

Their analysis names what made the social version work. Optimal experience during a social interaction was determined by the perceived level of challenges, the perceived level of cooperation, the immediateness and clarity of the feedback, and the level of skill.

Three of those four are the ordinary flow conditions. The fourth, cooperation, has no solitary equivalent at all.

Three things to do with this

1. Work out which end of the spectrum you actually need. If you want fewer interruptions, you want people present and uninvolved, which is a cafe or a library. If you want the absorption that comes from being depended on, you need a task where somebody else is genuinely in it with you. Arranging one when you needed the other is why coworking sometimes helps enormously and sometimes does nothing.

2. Pick shared things that answer back. The social activities that keep appearing are the ones with a visible edge, which is the same property that separates the activities that produce flow from the ones that just pass time. A game has a score. A song has a tempo. Cooking a meal with somebody has a point at which it is dinner. A conversation about nothing in particular, pleasant as it is, has none of that.

3. Stop treating other people as the thing that spoils concentration. The advice assumes company is a cost. Sometimes it is. But if the good hour you can actually remember from last week had somebody else in it, that is data about you, not an exception to the rule.

Flowdayz is a feel good app, and that last point is most of what it does. It notices which small things actually got you there, and some of them will turn out to have another person in them.

The empty room is one way in. It is not the door.