There are two frameworks that dominate serious thinking about attention and peak performance. One comes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who gave us flow theory. The other comes from Gloria Mark, the computer scientist who has spent decades measuring how human attention actually behaves in real workplaces. Both built quadrant models. Both arrived at four states. And on the surface, they appear to be mapping the same territory with different vocabulary.

But look closer, and a more interesting problem emerges — one that neither framework fully resolves, and one that points toward a cleaner underlying structure that neither author has made explicit.

Two Models, Four States Each

Csikszentmihalyi’s model organises attention around two axes: skill and challenge. When both are high and matched, you enter flow — the state of total absorption where time dissolves and performance peaks. When challenge exceeds skill, you experience anxiety. When skill exceeds challenge, you drift into boredom. When both are low, the result is apathy.

Mark’s model organises attention around challenge and engagement. When both are high, you are in a state of focus. When challenge is high but engagement is low, you experience frustration. When engagement is high but challenge is low, you enter what she calls rote attention — absorbing but effortless, like scrolling or simple tasks. When both are low, you experience boredom.

Map them side by side and the correspondence is exact:

The structural similarity is striking enough to raise a question: are these two independent models, or are they describing the same underlying reality through different lenses?

The Problem Hidden in Plain Sight

Here is where it gets interesting.

In Csikszentmihalyi’s model, engagement is the output. Skill and challenge are the inputs — the conditions you can alter, the levers you can pull. When they align, engagement rises. When they reach perfect balance, flow emerges. Engagement is what the model produces.

But in Mark’s model, engagement is an input dimension — one of the two axes that defines the quadrant. She treats it as an independent variable, something you can measure and plot, on equal footing with challenge.

This creates a logical problem. If engagement is genuinely the output of Csikszentmihalyi’s model, it cannot also function as a root-cause input in another model and arrive at the same four states. Something is misclassified somewhere. Either engagement is not truly the output of flow theory, or Mark’s framework has a structural error.

The answer, I believe, is the latter — and understanding why reveals something more fundamental about how attention actually works.

Engagement Is Not an Input. It Is the Continuum Itself.

Think of it this way. Imagine a single axis — a slider running from 1 to 100. At the low end sits apathy and boredom. At the high end sits flow. Everything in between is varying degrees of engagement. This is not a quadrant. It is a continuum.

What moves you along this continuum is the balance between skill and challenge. When they are well matched, you travel toward the high end. When they fall out of balance — when challenge far exceeds skill, or skill far exceeds challenge — you experience turbulence that pulls you off the trajectory.

This is where a useful analogy helps. In the film Top Gun: Maverick, there is a sequence where Maverick pushes his aircraft toward Mach 10. As he approaches the limit, the plane begins to wobble. The wobbles are not a different direction of travel — they are interference forces that act on his trajectory when the conditions push against the limits of control.

Anxiety and frustration work the same way. They are not separate quadrant domains sitting at right angles to the engagement continuum. They are what happens when the balancing conditions break down — when challenge and skill fall so far out of alignment that the trajectory itself becomes unstable. They are turbulence on the continuum, not alternative destinations.

This reframes Mark’s model entirely. Her four states are real. They are observable, measurable, and practically useful. But they are not four independent quadrants defined by two input dimensions. They are positions on — and deviations from — a single engagement continuum. Placing engagement as an axis alongside challenge is the equivalent of putting warmth on a model of fire alongside oxygen and fuel. Warmth is what fire produces. It is not one of the conditions that creates it.

But Csikszentmihalyi Is Also Incomplete

If Mark’s model has a structural problem, Csikszentmihalyi’s has a different one: it is incomplete.

Skill and challenge are not the only forces that move you along the engagement continuum. Consider urgency. A deadline arrives and suddenly your engagement spikes — not because your skill improved, not because the task became more complex, but because urgency created a forcing condition that moved you forward independently of either axis.

The same is true of meaning. If a task becomes personally significant — if you understand why it matters — engagement rises without any change in skill or challenge. Interest works similarly. Fear. Social pressure. Each of these is a distinct mechanism for moving along the continuum, and Csikszentmihalyi’s model accounts for none of them.

He identified two important drivers and built an elegant framework around them. But treating skill and challenge as the complete picture leaves most of the forces that actually govern human attention unaddressed.

What the Complete Picture Looks Like

The engagement continuum is the primary structure. It runs from disengagement at one end to flow at the other.

Multiple forces act on where you sit on that continuum at any given moment. Skill-challenge balance is one of the most important — Csikszentmihalyi’s genuine contribution. But urgency, meaning, interest, fear, and social context are equally real drivers, each capable of moving you along the continuum independently.

The states that Mark identifies — focus, rote, frustration, boredom — are real positions on and around this continuum. Her empirical work is valuable precisely because it gives us a diagnostic tool: a way to ask, in real time, where your attention currently sits. The flaw is in the causal architecture of her model, not in the states themselves.

And the wobbles — anxiety, frustration — are not destinations. They are what happens when the forces acting on you push against the limits of your current balance. They are signals, not categories.

The Deeper Question This Raises

If engagement is always an outcome — always downstream of something else — then the real question is: what are all the forces that determine it?

Csikszentmihalyi gave us two. But human beings allocate attention according to a much richer set of pressures. Threats demand attention regardless of skill or challenge. Obligations create urgency that overrides preference. Opportunities pull engagement upward through possibility. Growth — the sense of becoming something — sustains engagement over time in ways that no single task characteristic can explain.

The battle for human flourishing is, at its core, a battle for where attention goes. And attention goes where the forces that drive engagement are strongest — whether those forces are chosen deliberately or imposed by a world that has become extraordinarily skilled at capturing it without consent.

Understanding the full architecture of those forces is not an academic exercise. It is the most practical question of our time.

This article is part of an ongoing body of work on attention, wellbeing, and human flourishing.