Concept
Ordered consciousness
Ordered consciousness is the opposite of psychic entropy: a mind whose attention is directed at a goal it has chosen. Flow is ordered consciousness at full intensity; a calm, engaged afternoon is the same state at ordinary intensity.
Because attention is the channel through which all experience passes, control of attention is control of the quality of experience, and Csikszentmihalyi treats it as the central skill of a life. Order is not calm for its own sake; it is attention with a direction. It is produced by goals, which give the mind somewhere to go, by feedback, which tells it whether it is getting there, and by the removal of what competes. The daily version is unglamorous: a phone in another room, a book on the commute, a concrete intention for the next hour. The larger version is the choice of what a life is for, since a person whose days are spent in chosen attention accumulates a life that was theirs, and a person whose attention was taken by whatever pulled hardest accumulates one that was not. An hour-by-hour audit of where attention went (described under psychic entropy) is the measurement; the flow conditions are the method.
A real-life example
A translator in Ankara works from home and ends most days feeling she did nothing. She starts each work block by writing down the one paragraph she will finish, and leaves the phone in the hall until it is done. Within two weeks the days feel like hers again, though her workload has not changed.
How to use it
- 1Give each hour a direction: a goal for the work block, a person for the dinner, a book for the commute.
- 2Remove what competes for attention before it competes.
- 3Count the chosen hours weekly; the number is the measure of an ordered mind.