As anecdata makes the data, here's mine - you have a lot of control of it.
If you can control your environment (audio, light, temperature, food, exercise, communication, interaction, ...), you can get in the zone too just by virtue of almost exclusively focusing on some type of work you get in the zone for in the first place.
Live by code, die by code.
But give me something interesting - a real challenge - and I'm able to get into the zone, the hours flying by like they were minutes. My brain has to be able to fully engage with the problem to hit that zone.
Of course, I'm a technical lead in my group, so the ability to control my environment is limited. So I get up absurdly early just to get work done before I have to be available to be interrupted.
Or negociated a higher pay, so it becomes non viable financially for the employer to use me as a resource to do the routine stuff. This doesn't apply to code reviews though.
adderall
But then it's done. And then you forget all the mass information you absorbed and shat out onto a page.
I feel exactly the same way when I'm white water kayaking. As you are reading the water and choosing your line and focusing on executing it, everything else in life falls away. You almost can't be distracted. The interesting thing is that at the end of a run, I never feel mentally exhausted despite all the intense focus, only physically drained. Of course, ymmv.
For me, this is skiing. Complete focus and attention on the task at hand. Winter, come soon.
I just had what I consider to be the single most productive day in the past few months, and I started it feeling like I wasn't going to get anything done. But I decided to golf a regex in our codebase and I had that feeling of motivation and jumped right into actual work.
But funnily enough I find debugging to be the most fun when I'm in the zone (assuming I know the codebase). Something about being able to get really deep into a problem and having all the tools and programs and hardware open and running and all setup correctly.
It happens about 3-4 out of 5 times just because I real like the software I'm building or because I get thrilled about how to make something 'boring' a masterpiece to look at or even because I know there is something I don't understand.
It's almost like a drug to keep coding en digging deeper every day. To a point where I even feel somekind of a huge pressure in the middle of night to 'profit' very hard of the last minutes i' m awake.
Doesn't feel healthy anymore haha. But I just love to much somehow