Simply put, it is a state of total concentration and immersive self-forgetting—the term 'self-forgetting' is especially fitting: it's that state of forgetting the body's existence, retaining only your consciousness to feel everything you're focused on. There is no environment here, and no time. The benefits of flow are significant: beyond happiness, both your efficiency and effectiveness at work are much higher than usual.
So how do you build flow? There are three conditional factors: goals, feedback, and small challenges.
Set clear goals—everything needs a goal. To action, a goal is as essential as lungs are to breathing or opening your mouth to drink water. You can't skip asking what the goal is. A goal is a target visible to the eye; the clearer the target, the more effective the action—and effectiveness is what gives action its meaning. If a person feels life is meaningless, the reason may be that they have no goal. When we idle about with no direction, we always feel bored and empty, prone to questioning life and searching for meaning, piling up negative emotions—this is one reason for it.
Timely feedback provides continuous affirmation and rewards throughout the process of action, gradually building momentum for action, or what we call habit. Applying this timely feedback at work can appropriately reduce the mental resistance that work brings. Set up a reward system before each task, and when the work reaches a certain milestone, triggering a reward boosts motivation and keeps you in a consistently good working state.
A small-challenge study found that flow arises when the difficulty of a task is about 5% to 10% higher than your ability—too easy and you get bored, too hard and you get anxious. Hearing this, some people struggle: that sweet spot of neither bored nor anxious is hard to grasp. What exactly is 5% to 10% difficulty? Difficulty itself is hard to quantify. Forget the percentages and understand it this way: what you do has three parts—one part you've long been familiar with, one part you've just learned, and a little bit of something you've never done before. The familiar part feels like a smooth, well-traveled road and lets you enjoy a sense of ease. What you've just learned isn't easy, but pulling it off gives you a sense of worth. The little bit you've never done isn't too hard and is easy to succeed at, giving you a bit of a sense of accomplishment. This way you get a reward from each part, which makes flow easy to achieve. So if you set things up according to the three conditions above—goals, feedback, and small challenges—you can create flow, making your work both happy and efficient. But really, can it be done? If you followed this method, did you succeed?
Even when you proactively design for flow, most likely you can only build a sub-flow state that approaches it—reducing a bit of the negative and adding a bit of the positive is about the best you can expect, so don't count on it to make you superhuman. But then again, even though designing for sub-flow doesn't work as well as hoped, it's still better than not designing at all—so keep using it. Turning work into a game: we know it can't be as fun as a real game, but it will surely beat the unhappiness of pure work. When there is no joy, the absence of unhappiness is joy.
if no happy， no unhappy is happy。