A job is for wage. You don't mention programming as a hobby. Flow happens when you're personally engaged and truly interested in the solution you're building. T

A job is for wage. You don't mention programming as a hobby. Flow happens when you're personally engaged and truly interested in the solution you're building. This happens more on personal side-projects than at work, where the modern work-environment makes sure to interrupt us as much as possible. If programming is just the objective of codifying some business logic for a company, you won't become personally engaged. Also, non-trivial and complex solutions may break flow, as you have to walk and think more. Flow is more for those passages of coding where you jot down simple, but lengthy solutions, then realize a simple refactoring will DRY up the code. Then after 5 such iterations with some YAGNI, you've skipped lunch that day! You became engrossed in the work itself. Music may help, but becomes a distraction for any deeper design-thoughts. Nothing magical about flow, but feels very productive even though one might be working on the wrong solution all along! For gaming industry and huge codebases, programmers absolutely need to get into flow in order to manage to complete it all in time.