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Comment by alnayyir | Hacker News Reader

>get up and walk around as I chew through a problem in my head. Surely this doesn't constitute a break in "flow".

I'm afraid it most certainly does for myself and other programmers I know. My "walking around and contemplating" is a completely different mental state than flow for me, and flow produces an entirely different league of results above and beyond any other mode of working I've been in.

If I could discipline, harness, and achieve flow more quickly (like the people who teach themselves to dream lucidly) I would be a much better programmer.

As it is, I'm currently contemplating how to cope with the apparent health risks of sitting all day vs. achieving flow.

Going even a week without flow tends to depress me, I doubt I could make disrupting my work multiple times daily a regular part of my habits.

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Maybe we just work in different problem domains. For me, the _easy_ part is writing the code. Figuring out what to write and how the system should be designed (or what is slow about this piece of code) is the hard part.

I could see how some problem domains wouldn't be amenable to this.

The code writing isn't the hard part per se, it's simply that I work for a startup and have a lot of work to do. My best design decisions and code and productivity come out of flow.

I'm into functional languages like you are, but my background is in Lisp and Scheme where the cultural norm is to do bottom-up design and refactor/redesign as you go.

If I feel trapped into my decisions, I've written poor code or made an uncommonly bad design.

Wireless headphones. The quality isn't as good, but they do wonders for allowing me to get up and move, whilst staying in the flow. Might want to give it a try.

I walk around plugged into my iPhone, portability isn't the issue, perturbing my physical state is. If I have to pause to think to move around or have an alarm that does this for me, I'm going to lose flow instantly.

Edit: Point being, I've never been in a state of flow that lent me the presence of mind to be able to tell myself, "Time to get up and move around", and any attempts to do so would destroy it.

I picked up an OfficeRunner [http://www.officerunner.com/] headset last year. I spend 4+ hours a day on skype calls -- the ability to step away from my desk has been priceless. I originally looked for an app for my iPhone that would function as a wireless headset. There are one or two in the app store, but they all have latency issues...

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