Hacking Flow: From Lived Practices to Innovation

TL;DR

This paper explores how digital knowledge workers naturally foster flow through everyday practices, providing insights and design opportunities for digital interventions that enhance well-being and productivity.

Contribution

It uncovers lived interventions for flow in digital work, validating them through surveys and offering new directions for designing digital support tools.

Findings

38 lived interventions identified across four categories

Interventions vary in endorsement and polarization

Design opportunities for future digital flow support

Abstract

In digital knowledge work, flow promises not just productivity; it offers a pathway to well-being. Yet despite decades of flow research in HCI, we know little about how to design digital interventions that support it. In this work, we foreground lived interventions - everyday practices workers already use to foster flow - to uncover overlooked opportunities and chart new directions for digital intervention design. Specifically, we report findings from two studies: (1) a reflexive thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses (n = 160), surfacing 38 lived interventions across four categories: environment, organization, task shaping, and personal readiness; and (2) a quantitative online survey (n = 121) that validates this repertoire, identifies which interventions are broadly endorsed versus polarizing, and elicits visions of technological support. We contribute empirical insights into how digital workers cultivate flow, situate these lived interventions within existing literature, and derive design opportunities for future digital flow interventions.