You know that feeling when you’re “in flow?” Athletes call “being in the zone;” those moments when you’re so in the moment that you forget time?

Mihail Csikszentmihalyi originally studied this effect in Flow; studying high-level athletes and emergency responders such as doctors, firefighters, etc. He described the conditions which tend to favor flow-state.

As it turns out, the most addictive online games follow the same secret recipe (see the highly entertaining What makes games fun? by Sebastian Deterding or Zachary Burt’s great behavioral science explanation.)

Could you use this for your teams at work? Could you get your team as addicted to successfully completing your goals as they’d be to Farmville?

Here were some of the original Flow principles; let’s see what we could apply; drawing on the presentations of both Deterding and Burt.)

To be turned into a flow activity; make goals and projects specific and measurable:

People generally don’t like uncertainty, ambiguity, and vague, undefined boundaries. Clarity and certainty feels a whole lot better. They want to know where they’re heading, how they’re going to get there, and how fast they’re progressing.

- Where they’re heading and how they’re going to get there: To quote Burt, “People need steps. What creates the feeling of overwhelm isn’t the amount of stuff to accomplish per se; but this ambiguous amorphous monstrous blob.” So chunk projects down into steps that seem easily manageable– the classic approach to avoiding both overwhelm and procrastination.

- How fast they’re progressing: People want to know where they stand, with regards to end-goal completion; and compared to others. We all tend towards social comparison. As pack animals, it’s good to know where we are in the pecking order so we know how much we can demand. Otherwise, we risk asking for too much and being denied, or too little and thus obtaining less than we could have.

Ideally, make this progression visually clear; the more visual the better. As Deterding points out, online games do a great job of showing us with appealing graphics where we stand at all times; whether it be in terms of accomplishments (points or weapons gained) or in terms of ranking (player ranking list). From my perspective, the reason graphs, charts, and storyboard work so well is that language, if you think of it, is relatively recent for us humans.

Another Flow recommendation was for the activity’s level of difficulty to be well-matched to the person’s level of skill. In games, the designers can orchestrate steps so that challenges get increasingly difficult as the player gains skill. You can’t always control that in business (or in life). But perhaps you can schedule smaller, easier chunks early on to create momentum and early wins.

Early wins are critical– and in fact, constant, encouraging positive feedback throughout the progress– remember that behavioral conditioning is one of the most powerful tools you have to mold people’s behavior (or your own!). Ideally, there should always be a clear reward for the completion of the very next goal; which should seems very attainable, right around the corner. And if you want to create urgency throughout the process, just add deadlines to each chunk.

With all this being said, there’s a danger to flow. Peter Cheeseman (a former NASA senior research scientist), maintains that you’ve got to extract yourself regularly to do the “meta analysis.” Are you working on the right problem? Most people don’t stop to evaluate that– and it’s easy to get caught in the high of making progress. “You otherwise run the risk of being smart people working on a stupid problem. “