Flow Your Intelligence

What Makes You Flow?

A lot of productivity experts talk about achieving a “flow state” when you work. The idea is that, instead of doing a bunch of tasks that you hate and resent, you do something that makes you enter a productive trance. You lose a sense of time and space, and you move forward producing with vibrance and enthusiasm at the center of your product. You are a self-driven unit of productivity.

Using your intelligence can feel like this whether you are working or playing, concentrating hard on solving a problem or treading lightly as you enact a perfect-fit solution. Your mind can hit its groove and you can find yourself driving yourself forward to learn more and know better with barely a care for the externals. All the noise of worry and self-doubt falls away and you just flow in your intelligence.

Time Crunches

I’ve been thinking of this in the context of learning and testing knowledge. Psychologist Adam Grant has a new op-ed out in the New York Times that talks about the SATs and their time limits, which the College Board will remove starting next year. He argues that time crunches hurt the majority of people’s chances of doing their best on a test. Time pressures cloud the mind and put it into the opposite of a flow state—a slow state in which learning and performing one’s mastery over learned material is impossible.

In addition to curbing students’ abilities to do their best, timing becomes just another sorting mechanism for test-makers to privilege the privileged. You have probably heard the phrase “teaching to the test,” which is what educators complain about when they are forced to spend entire school years preparing students for standardized tests like the SATs. Well, today there is also another problem in that wealthy families can hire test consultants to work with their privileged kids and “teach to the test” off-hours, giving their already privileged kids another leg up on taking tests. These consultants also teach these students how to manage the time crunch. And what happens? You guessed it—yet another leg up on taking tests. These particular students who have the best tools money can buy are well-trained to perform better on the tests that trip up just about everyone else.

Removing that time stipulation will help equalize the SATs, so I join Adam Grant in applauding the College Board’s decision. However, there is still great inequality around testing and test prep that demands more changes. If you haven’t checked out my TikTok on the sordid origins of the SATs, and the harm it continues to do today, go see it! Rather than tweak the SATs, I say we #EndTheTest.