User blog:WikiaSphinx/My way back to HabitRPG: Part 3. Exploiting the Flow

First of all I should ask you to excuse me as this post comes a bit unprepared. That’s why it may be a bit lengthy. However I guess I should finish the saga at last – as it’s been already a month since I first got an idea to write some notes about the flow.

Well, after the first two of my posts the main question I wanted to talk about is still left unrevealed. Why do I think that HabitRPG may be misleading? To explain my point, I’d like to remind you what the flow is.

In positive psychology, the flow (named this way by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi) is the mental state of full involvement in an activity. It’s the special mood in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, and enjoyment in the process of the activity itself. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.

The flow is characterized by several distinctive features which reflect the experience of harnessing the emotions in the service of performing an activity:


 * deep focus on nothing but the activity and the present moment;


 * one's subjective experience of time is altered;


 * experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience (each next step or challenge of the activity is regarded as a reward for accomplishing the previous subtask).

The latter point involves the following aspects:


 * feeling that you have the potential to succeed – and get immediate feedback / reward;


 * loss of reflective self-consciousness which is replaced by…


 * …the feeling of spontaneous joy while performing a task;


 * Feeling so engrossed in the experience, that other needs become negligible.

So you see why Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called this state the flow – sometimes you simply get carried away immersing into some activity. And it’s really great to feel the flow when you’re studying something new, when you happen to enjoy tidying up and cleaning your house, when you go to intensive weekend training course in management and so on.

As an excellent tool of gamification, HabitRPG can create enormous flow for almost any activity, as it seems.

Have you seen the “Yes man” movie? I personally like the book better, but the latter is not so sharp in outlining the states of mind: No man – Yes man – and the better one. HabitRPG is great when it comes to making you a Yes man. And a year ago I first felt how much fun, self-rewarding and vivid the process of completing tasks can become with HabitRPG. I came here to widen my world, make life brighter and learn to see opportunities – and I felt I got it! I felt the flow with setting new habits, dailies and tasks for myself – and achieving them day by day!

A possible point of interest – it has been said somewhere that To-Dos are there in HabitRPG to help players level-up faster. And it’s true the process of leveling-up may encourage a user to add more and more tasks to the lists of Habits, Dailies, and To-Dos.

Thus I ended up a year ago more and more often having again the feeling of jumping above turtles and various other creatures, running between platforms and collecting mushrooms and flowers and not approaching the castle – i.e. not reaching my goals... These moments can be very discouraging as they create and strengthen the gestalt of you not being able to reach a certain goal. This may cause frustration and have strong impact on your other goals. And then came the moment of insight about the main risk of the flow.

As you immerse yourself into some activity and experience the flow, by its definition, you completely lose the sense of your long-term goals. When activity has many directions to develop itself – you can easily be sidetracked going with the flow.

Of course you can never tell for sure which way is the best one to help you reach your goals and dreams – including the ones you don’t even know about yet. I really like the concept of connecting the dots by Steve Jobs (please watch this TED video with his speach if you haven’t yet). Accepting a guild challenge to find a camel to ride may not only enrich your life experience but also end up changing your life completely one day. You never know what route will lead to your happiness.

However the borderline between the flow and an aimless activity switching is very easy to cross. In this case the goals may become unreachable. Turning back to the “Yes man” movie, a state called the “Yes man” is not actually the desired one. Being able to see opportunity doesn’t mean all the opportunities should be actually used. Catching the “negative flow” turns you into a Yes man – someone not being able to say No, when you actually should do so. However you are simply not being able to see what you SHOULD DO when you enjoy the energy of the flow at some moment.

The opposite risk is the situation when the positive flow is turning into negative hyperfocus. Spending too much time getting pleasurably absorbed by one aspect of an assignment or task to the detriment of the overall assignment. It’s the way back generally to No man – as a person experiencing hyperfocus is not able to see other opportunities.

The logical solution which comes to the main character of the Yes man (both: the movie and the book) is the state of Decision maker – a person able to see an opportunity and to evaluate its outcomes judging against personal goals. I would agree with this one as what may really be needed is perhaps judging the opportunities and prioritizing the tasks in accordance with personal goals.

That brings me to my experience with some To-Do lists managements services I’ve been able to get during the year away from HabitRPG. I won’t reveal the names as most of the apps on the market are quite good in managing the tree of: goal –sub-goals (projects) – tasks – sub-tasks; and getting things done. However not all the goals can be divided into SMART tasks. Some goals just require some time for devoted consistent work. Apart from that the main difference between a task and a daily/habit for me is that I always need to think a task over a bit and find the most efficient way to accomplish it. On the contrary, habits and dailies for me are some necessary things that I don’t want to spend my willpower on. I want to arrange them in manageable chunks and segments of flow. I haven’t found a single other app that handles the process of building habits or giving up ones in a more efficient way than HabitRPG.

I really wish the goal setting could become a starting point for beginners on HabitRPG one day; so that we don’t get sidetracked so easily. I tried to use tags as goal markers, but I didn’t get used to it. When I see a player/user going to the Inn when there are some major tasks to be done – for me it’s a signal there may be too many side-tracking tasks on their lists. It’s unfortunate, because HabitRPG proves to be really handy when there’s growing work load and one shouldn’t forget about some things they want to do with the flow even when there’s no willpower to generate it.

Finally in order to control the flow I’m using a separate Goals managing app with GTD approach to tasks. Whenever I’m coming across a goal/project/task which requires building or giving up a habit I’ll switch to HabitRPG and do the following:


 * 1) I put the wanted result on the list of To-Dos as a goal


 * 1) I set Dailies and Habits corresponding to the To-Do

I appreciate this another insight that HabitRPG gives me in the scope of Emotional intelligence
 * 1) I try to check if ALL the things on my lists in HabitRPG are in line with my Goals each week.

And of course I'd like to use this opportunity to say thank you very much, Habiticans! I’m proud to be back here with you! Communicating with wonderful HabitRPG community is a great reward for me )