Finding Flow in the Age of Distraction: Why deep focus is among the most important skills today

Author: Dr. Jon Beale

We’re living in the age of distraction. This is negatively impacting our productivity, attention spans, ability to focus, and even our health.

Reaching the highest level of sustained focus, a flow state, has never been harder. Yet, it has never been more important.

Flow is the state of optimal attention and performance, in which we completely concentrate on a challenging but doable activity, stretching a skill to its limit. It was identified in the 70s by the “father of flow,” psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote in his 1990 book Flow that it “tends to occur when a person’s skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable.”

Flow is that feeling of being “in the zone”: when you’re playing a sport, solving a complex problem, or so lost in a book you can’t put it down. It can happen alone or with others, like when you improvize in a jam session or ideate in a team sprint.

Csikszentmihalyi called this state “flow” because of the way thousands of people he interviewed often described their experiences of completely focusing on a challenging activity. They reported being totally absorbed such that they lost track of time and stopped thinking about what they were doing. They engaged at their highest level effortlessly, yet felt a greater sense of control. They were one with their actions, in flow with them.

Research has shown that flow improves our health, well-being and performance. From interviewing over 10,000 people, Csikszentmihalyi found that those who often experience flow “tend … to report more positive states overall and to feel that their lives are more purposeful and meaningful.” Many described flow experiences as the highlights of their lives. This led to flow becoming one of the components of human flourishing posited by positive psychology, the scientific study of flourishing.

In recent years, many more benefits have been discovered of regularly experiencing flow, known as being “flow prone.” A 2024 study of almost 9,500 people showed that “flow proneness” reduces our risk of several mental and physical health diagnoses. People with higher flow proneness had lower risk of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, stress-related disorders and cardiovascular disorders.

Other research has found that people who are flow prone report lower levels of emotional exhaustion, which reduces the risk of burnout. Flow is associated with greater creativity, intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, productivity, student engagement, self-esteem, coping strategies, life satisfaction and psychological well-being.

So flow isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a measurable predictor of health and flourishing.

But reaching flow has never been so difficult. Our attention spans are shrinking at an alarming rate, which is making it harder to reach the level of sustained focus necessary for flow. Attention expert Gloria Mark has discovered that the average time office workers today focus on a single task before switching their attention is 47 seconds. That’s data from studies in 2023. In 2004, the average was two and a half minutes. That’s a reduction of over 100 seconds in under 20 years. Given the trend, today our attention spans are probably even shorter.

Getting into flow is like falling asleep: you can’t force it, but you can optimize the conditions for reaching it. It almost always takes much longer than 47 seconds. But in today’s world, most of us aren’t sustaining our attention on a task for long enough to reach flow.

Research shows that when our focus is interrupted, it takes an average of almost 25 and a half minutes to regain focus on the interrupted task. On our journey back to the task, we typically work on at least two other things. So when you’re focusing on an important task and your phone pings, the interruption is longer than the few seconds it took to pick up your phone and put it back down. It takes much longer to restore your focus, and you’ll likely turn to a couple of other things, such as replying to an email and a text message.

When we switch our attention, we also don’t immediately switch to full focus. There’s a lag, which psychologists call “attention residue”: the residual effect a previous object of our attention leaves in our minds. Rather than flipping like a lightswitch, our attention gradually fades from one thing as it increases on another.

Mark calls the most common type of attention in our working lives today “kinetic attention”: a “dynamic state of attention characterized by rapid shifts, such as between applications, social media and internet sites, or between the computer and phone.” Mastering kinetic attention is important today. But it’s problematic if you’re spending most of your time in this state and not much time focusing for a sustained period of time.

A shrinking attention span doesn’t only negatively impact our ability to reach flow. It also harms our health. Research suggests that inattention and shortening attention spans are negatively impacting our mental and physical health. Studies show that the faster students switch attention, the higher their stress. Multitasking is associated with negative emotions such as stress and anxiety, and can lead to burnout.

Increasing evidence shows associations between inattention, lower mental health and academic attainment. A longitudinal study in the UK published in 2024 found that hyperactivity and inattention were consistently identified as the mental health behaviors most strongly associated with lower academic attainment. Three quarters of the association was due to these. The study’s author, Matthew van Poortvliet, writes that the findings “add to a growing body of evidence supporting the conclusion that … hyperactivity/inattention is the principal predictor of low attainment.”

In a world where kinetic attention is the norm, those who become flow prone also have a professional advantage. In his 2016 book Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that the ability to do “deep work” – “activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit” – is “becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy.” The fundamentals of deep work are the same as flow: totally focusing on activities that push our skills to their limit. And the ability to engage in deep work is arguably as beneficial as flow: Newport writes that “the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”

Newport isn’t exaggerating. Given the benefits of flow and the risks of reduced attention, finding focus, let alone flow, in today’s world can prevent us from languishing and help us flourish.

Cultivating our ability to do deep work and reach flow is difficult in a distracted world. The good news is that people often report most frequently experiencing flow doing the thing we spend most of our lives doing: work. The other good news is that we can experience flow in a huge array of tasks. It most often occurs in creative activities, such as painting, but you can reach flow doing everything from sewing to surfing. The key is that you’re not switching your attention rapidly, but totally focusing on a challenging task.

Want to find your flow? To start, think of challenging activities you become so immersed doing that you lose track of time. Yoga, writing, reading, running, coding – whatever activity stretches your skills and requires your total concentration. Chances are, that’s one of your flow experiences. Now ask: how can I make more space for that?

Protect your attention. Find your flow. And make more time for it.

Continue the conversation inside the Flow Lab

Want to learn more? Gloria Mark is among the guest speakers we’ve had in our free monthly Flow Lab Masterclasses. You can join future masterclasses and watch recordings of past ones in the Flow Lab.

References

1.Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness (London: Random House), 2002 [1990], p. 74.

2.Csikszentmihalyi, “If we are so rich, why aren't we happy?,” American Psychologist 54:10, 1999, p. 825.

3. Johann Hari, Stolen Focus (London: Bloomsbury), 2022, p. 51.

4.Gloria Mark, Victor González and Justin Harris, “No task left behind? Examining the nature of fragmented work,” CHI 2005, pp. 321-330.

5.Gloria Mark, Attention Span (Toronto: Hanover Square Press), 2023, p. 102.

6. Ibid., p. 46.

7. Ibid., p. 107.

8. Ibid., p. 17.

9. “Child mental health and educational attainment: Longitudinal evidence from the UK,” SSM -

Mental Health, 2024, p. 9.

10. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Grand Central Publishing), 2016, p. 3.

11. Ibid., p. 14.

12. Ibid.