What constitutes as work or play has to do with frustrations, stress, and boredom. The flow state has to do with our emotional state and regulation during certain activities regarding those activities. When people get stressed or bored, they become distracted because their emotions are telling them that they need to be doing something else. This is where procrastination starts because you eventually have to come back to that stress/boredom. If you are coming back from procrastination, then you are mentally primed to more easily feel stressed or bored again, and the cycle repeats until you finish the task, which would bring you a sense of joy and relief from having to go back to that frustration. If the nature of your work is more or less the same, then you are prone to falling into the same cycle again. Doing this for a long time is what people call burning out.
One way to break up the monotony is to introduce variety in people’s work. I suspect this would help some but not others. I think a better metric would be to find the type of work that would match with the person’s interest, thus maximizing their level of engagement in the activities, leading to a flow state. Society’s demand for efficiency forces people to lock into singular career paths, which might actually be rather counterproductive on a large scale.
What constitutes as work or play has to do with frustrations, stress, and boredom. The flow state has to do with our emotional state and regulation during certain activities regarding those activities. When people get stressed or bored, they become distracted because their emotions are telling them that they need to be doing something else. This is where procrastination starts because you eventually have to come back to that stress/boredom. If you are coming back from procrastination, then you are mentally primed to more easily feel stressed or bored again, and the cycle repeats until you finish the task, which would bring you a sense of joy and relief from having to go back to that frustration. If the nature of your work is more or less the same, then you are prone to falling into the same cycle again. Doing this for a long time is what people call burning out.
One way to break up the monotony is to introduce variety in people’s work. I suspect this would help some but not others. I think a better metric would be to find the type of work that would match with the person’s interest, thus maximizing their level of engagement in the activities, leading to a flow state. Society’s demand for efficiency forces people to lock into singular career paths, which might actually be rather counterproductive on a large scale.