Have you ever been so engrossed in a task or a discussion that time just seems to evaporate? For me, it happens when I’m doing something just like I’m doing now – sitting down to organize a jumble of seemingly random thoughts and writing them into something cohesive. Inevitably, just when I get going, the calendar notification pops up and I have to lift my head, stop what I’m doing and hop on the next Zoom meeting. And – bam – it’s gone, and often hard to get the momentum going again.
That feeling has a name – it’s called “effortless attending” or “flow” – and it was coined by a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (it’s also discussed in depth in one of my all-time favorite books, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman). We all experience it. It’s that feeling you get when you’re so engrossed in something that you lose sense of everything else because your concentration is singularly focused on the task at hand.