Work environments and the Flow

In this post I will talk about the Flow state, and why it is important to provide developers with environments that enable then to attain that state. First, what is Flow?

"Flow" is the name given to a mental state of deep concentration, when you can spend literally hours on a problem without getting easily distracted. In this state people can work on harder problems than they can usually work on, because they can keep track of more problem variables and levels of abstraction. When you are in the Flow it seems that the time flies by, but in the end you are still amazed at how much work you accomplished during that period. Flow is the state you are usually in when you are alone at the office working late hours without anything to distract you. During those late hours, you are usually able to get more work done than during the whole day.

It is very difficult to get into the Flow, but it is very easy to lose it. It usually takes 10 to 15 minutes to get into a Flow state, and during this period any small distraction breaks you concentration and you have to start over. Once you are in the Flow things are better, and you only lose it if there is a distraction directed specifically to you, like a coworker calling your name to ask you a question, for instance. Every time you wake up from the Flow state, it takes you 10 to 15 minutes to go back to it again.

Flow is THE productivity silver bullet for software development. It enables developers to work faster and produce better quality code. If people are writing software outside of the flow, they usually introduce much more bugs because of the lack of concentration.

Software companies should provide their developers with work environments that make the Flow possible. The problem is that it is very difficult. Here is a quick list of things a developer needs to get and stay into the Flow.

1. Quiet work environment. No one will get into the flow if there are people talking around them all day long. Ideally, developers should have individual rooms with doors, or at most, small rooms where two or three people work together. This goes against some Agile evangelists that encourage the open spaces, under the theory that this promotes communication. But people who encourage open spaces clearly don't do programming as their main activity.


2. Kill other distractions. Things like IM software and mail popups can kill the concentration very easily. So developers should be allowed, and actually encouraged, to close their IM and email software whenever they like.


3. Quick compile cycles. Having a quiet environment is no good if it takes you too long to compile the software. And too long in this case is anything longer than a few seconds. If this happens, the developer will most likely switch to the web browser to check the latest news, or switch to the email client to check the last messages, and the hard earned Flow goes down the drain. Using Test Driven Development helps you to stay in the flow, because it is quicker to compile the code and run the tests as opposed to having to redeploy and restart the application every time.

Having said all that, most software companies don't do any of these. It is very hard to convince upper management to give individual rooms to developers. It is also very hard to convince them that too much information at once is a bad thing and it is OK to turn off the internal IM and email sofware.

But even if you don't have the ideal work environment, there are still things you can do by yourself. You can avoid asking other people silly questions that you can figure out by yourself with a little research. Otherwise, To save yourself a couple of minutes, you make the other person lose 10 minutes to get back into the Flow.

You can also take actions to isolate yourself from the surrounding distractions. The approached preferred by 9 in 10 developers is to listen to music in a headphone. I don't like to listen to music all day, so I sometimes listen to pink noise. You can also try noise canceling headphones.

Another suggestion is to move your desk so that you are not looking at the aisle. Try facing a window, a wall, or a corner of the office that has less movement. This avoids visual distractions.

Neal Ford suggests in his The Productive Programmer book that the team institutes a Quiet Time, a few hours a day when people should be left alone to work and chatter in the office should be avoided. He says that in the team where it was instituted, people looked forward to those hours as the most anticipated period of the day. In order to work, though, this has to be agreed by the team members so that everyone respects it.

Getting in the flow is very difficult, and most managers don't value it since managers are supposed to multitask so the Flow is not important to them. Setting up the environment so that the team can achieve the Flow state can be a daunting task, but if this is done, the productivity gains will be worth the effort.

More information:
Peopleware is a must read book for any software development manager. It discusses the concept of Flow and also good work environments for developers.