Working in Mount Cook and the Flow
Well, for the last two days four of us have been holed up in the Hermitage Hotel coding and planning the Travel Generation website. We thought that a boot camp style retreat would allow us to focus our efforts away from the everyday harassment of the office - and wow have we done alot!!
Next week we will launch the private alpha version of Travel Generation. This first release code-named “Athens”, after the first city of the modern era will allow invited users to bookmark a whole raft of data from across the Internet (pages, URL’s, images) to a travel planning platform where they will be able to schedule their travel, show it on a map and create a profile. This release will be followed up quickly by the “Bejing” release (in honour of the Olympic Games) in which we will introduce user profiling and the ability to share your travel plans with friends and family, Facebook, and blogs. The user interfaces have been designed by Mat Weir and myself and we think they are going to pretty cool - even at Athens release stage.
In writing this announcement however I really go thinking about why have we achieved so much more in the past two days than we would normally in our office environment? Quite simply is comes down to what Csikszentmihalyi would call “flow”.
The answer is in the psychological principal of understanding the influence of the “here and now” in our ability to focus on whatever task we set our mind to. The need to focus and concentrate is obvious but it is something we rarely achieve. Achieving true creativity is difficult when you attention and energies are continually drawn elsewhere. By coming to Mount Cook, away from the Internet with the continual falling of snow outside has concentrated our energies onto building the Travel Generation website; we are all definitely in the flow.
I think I will take three very important points away from this week:
- Importance of focusing on present timeframes, but also future possibilities to ignite the sensors - but to keep the focus clear on what can be achieved here and now over letting yourself dream
- That focusing on the process of getting it done over the outcome works; and
- The influence of sensory details (the nice hotel, the snow, the good company) in achieving focus
The concept of being in the flow is something that can be taken further away from just the psychology of work or everyday life to how we interact say with a business or website. In fact, I believe that by getting ourselves in a unique sensory overload the site that we have finally pulled together for Travel Generation reflects that very principal and users will find that the become drawn into it - drawn into the flow - and therefore will find it easy to use and return to it again and again.
If you would like to help us out and become al Alpha tester please feel free to contact us for a login; and I think we are all looking forward to the next TG Camp hopefully in Franz Josef later this year.
Tags: Travel Generation