Stealing fire for OSS

I’ve recently started reading a book called Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. To completely over-generalise the subject matter, it’s about finding optimal performance states, aka finding flow. Not the normal topic of conversation for here on the PAOSS blog!!

However, the book’s content has helped to make the link between flow and OSS more palpable than you might think.

In the early days of working on OSS delivery projects, I found myself getting into a flow state on a daily basis – achieving more than I thought capable, learning more effectively than I thought capable and completely losing track of time. In those days of project delivery, I was lucky enough to get hours at a time without interruptions, to focus on what was an almost overwhelming list of tasks to be done. Over the first 5-ish years in OSS, I averaged an 85 hour week because I was just so absorbed by it. It was the source from where my passion for OSS originated. Or was it??

The book now has me pondering a chicken or egg conundrum – did I become so passionate about OSS that I could get into a state of flow or did I only become passionate about OSS because I was able to readily get into a state of flow with it? That’s where the book provides the link between getting in the zone and the brain chemicals that leave us with a feeling of ecstasis or happiness (not to mention the addictive nature of it). The authors describe this state of consciousness as Selflessness, Timelessness, Effortlessness, and Richness, or STER for short. OSS definitely triggered STER for me,, but chicken or egg??

Having spent much of the last few years embedded in big corporate environments, I’ve found a decreased ability to get into the same flow state. Meetings, emails, messenger pop-ups, distractions from surrounding areas in open-plan offices, etc. They all interrupt. It’s left me with a diminishing opportunity to get in the zone. With that has come a growing unease and sense of sub-optimal productivity during “office hours.” It was increasingly disheartening that I could generally only get into the zone outside office hours. For example, whilst writing blogs on the train-trip or in the hours after the rest of my family was asleep.

Since making the concerted effort to leave that “office state,” I’ve been both surprised and delighted at the increased productivity. Not just that, but the ability to make better lateral connections of ideas and to learn more effectively again.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments section below. Some big questions for you:

  1. Have you experienced a similar productivity gap between “flow state” and “office state” on your OSS projects?
  2. Have you had the same experience as me, where modern ways of working seem to be lessening the long chunks of time required to get into flow state?
  3. If yes, how can our sponsor organisations and our OSS products continue to progress if we’re increasingly working only in office state?

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