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Anita Olsen
Anita Olsen

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How do you Reach the Flow State While Programming?

You are completely immersed in what you are doing and it seems as if time stands still. You are at your best, everything seems to be going smoothly and you are feeling great!

This is called the flow state and you have probably experienced it many times. How do you reach the flow state while programming?

Top comments (7)

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Anton Shvein

5 to 10 minutes meditation with looking around your thoughts helps me to choose the right thing to focus on. Sometimes it helps to shift my mind from what it wants to focus on to what I need to do. But it is not absolute anyhow.

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Anita Olsen

5 to 10 minutes meditation, great idea! I highly appreciate your reply. Thank you!

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Alex Lau

The biggest things for me are to have some music going and to remove distractions like social media. Bonus points for having automated tests in place, as I feel like my best flow state happens when I'm refactoring tests that go from red to green!

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Anita Olsen

I totally agree about removing distractions which is essential for allowing the flow state in the first place. Indeed, I have noticed myself that music can help with this. I appreciate your comment!

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Artem Sapegin

In my case it's probably more ADHD hyperfocus than flow state, and it doesn't happen as often as it used to some 15 years ago ;-| I think there are two main requirements for me: the task should be very interesting for me, and there should be no distractions.

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Ranjan Dailata

Generally, I follow the "first principle thinking", which enables me to design a better system which is easy to maintain, scalable, robust enough to handle the load etc.

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Anita Olsen

Thank you for sharing! I will look into "first principle thinking".