The Flow Awards honor technology that supports creative flow. Nominees are proposed and ranked by members of the Flow Academy, which is the community of users of this site, open to all who are interested (and who agree to the terms of use).

What Is Flow?

Flow is the sense of being blissfully lost in creative work. Time, ego and anxiety disappear, a pure unity of creator and creation. It’s similar to the state of being “in the zone” in sports, or of samadhi in Buddhist meditation.

A detailed description is provided by researcher Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi:

1. You are completely immersed in what you are doing.
2. Concentration is very high.
3. You know what you have to do moment by moment.
4. You have very quick and precise feedback as to how well you are doing.
5. Your abilities are stretched but not overwhelmed by the challenges.
6. You begin to forget all the things that bother you in everyday life, forget the self as an entity separate from what is going on. You feel you are a part of something greater and you are just moving along with the logic of the activity.

(Based on an interview with Csikszentmihalyi’s interview in What Is Enlightenment magazine and on his book The Evolving Self, especially pp. 178–179.)