More specifically, flow can be achieved in both physical and mental activities, both with people and alone, and both at work and during leisure. In fact, one of the author's goals is to explain how a person can and should find flow in practically every activity he's engaged in. Clearly, flow is possible not only in computer programming. A person in flow is a happy person, and thus directing one's life on a path to being in flow as much as possible is desirable. The author claims that flow is a major key to happiness.
The state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.
In this book (from 1990) Csíkszentmihályi summarizes his ideas in a layman-friendly fashion (previous publications have been more academic). Not many know, however, that such a state has been clearly defined and explained by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in the 1970s. Being 'in the zone' is a very desirable state, because it's the one where programmers are most productive. It's when we get so immersed in coding that time passes by very quickly. This is the state of 'being in the zone', or 'being in flow'. We coders know a state which is familiar to everyone, even if a bit hard to explain. As are most of this blog's readers, I'm a computer programmer.
