Flow

I just responded to a Facebook posting about the psychological concept of flow, an intellectual state of effortless high performance. I think my access to the state of flow was enhanced by having Aspergers.

I used to experience flow when doing math or programming. I remember many times it would be warm in Denver and I would be at my computer doing math in just a pair of gym shorts and I would look at the clock and see it was 6:00 PM and realize I needed to eat and dress warmer, but first I would do just a do little more work. The next thing I would know it would be 12:00 AM or 1:00 AM and I was still at my computer. I would stand up and realize that I was very stiff, freezing cold, starving and hypoglycemic.

In programming in the Eighties I used to write forty or so lines of code a day. Not bad by normal standards, but not really that good either. Then I passed through a boundary where I became confident enough that I was no longer worried about the pressures of work. I would slump down in my chair with my body totally relaxed and I began banging out three hundred to four hundred lines of code a day. My peak was when I had an assignment to rewrite from scratch an entire software subsystem. I had just finished and done a good job on a sister subsystem and I also had the code for a very messed up attempt at the new system that did at least identify many of the data variables that I needed to use. I sat down in a single sitting and wrote over two thousand lines of code that ended up having only two very small bugs in just a bit over seven hours. Not many programmers can crank two thousand lines of almost perfect code in seven hours. But I was so spent at the end of the day that the power of speech literally deserted me and I could only grunt goodbye as I left early for home.