by jerome-jh
4 subcomments
- When I started working, more than 25 years ago, we had one team meeting per week (1 hour), very few other meetings. Cellphones were getting mainstream and people had these funny ringtones, but since communications were expensive, phones were not ringing often. The office phone was ringing even more seldomly. We had no ticketing system. Managers just trusted you for doing your work. When going to someone else desk we would start with "may I disturb you?", and the answer may have been "give me five minutes". We had like 2-3 emails a day. It turns out someone had the radio in the office. That was in Belgium and the radio was in Flemish. This was not a big deal since I do not understand Flemish. Despite being rather cramped, I remember this office as quiet. It was not a large open-space though.
I cannot remember the turning point. Of course "agile" did a lot of damage, then ticketing systems, the illusion that developers are swap-able, and now constant notification stream.
by belviewreview
0 subcomment
- The thing about focused work, at least a lot of it, is that before you start making any progress you first have to remember a whole lot of specifics, like facts, goals, constraints, and so on, and how they all fit together to form the situation you are dealing with and what you are trying to do. And that takes uninterrupted time. If you are interrupted, it all evaporates from your mind and you have to remember them all over again.
It also takes mental energy, which everyone has only so much of each day. If you are interrupted, then all the mental energy you had spent is wasted, and you have less left for the rest of the day.
One more thought. I think the people who don't understand why interrupting is bad are people who they themselves don't know how to think in a sustained, focused manner on a difficult problem. And as a consequence of smartphones, such people are considerably more common than they used to be.
- I am the author of this piece. It was something I put together as a curiosity and wanted to play with Astro. Hope you all enjoyed it!
- I remember Jeff Bezos said that something like promoting more communication/collaboration is wrong.
And managers should focus on making people working independently.
by OnionBlender
0 subcomment
- The model assumes the day begins with focus time. My day always starts with me recovering from the stress of my commute.
- I don't think you need to simulate this, the number of "deep work" slots should be (λD+1)(1-d)^(λD) where d=(Δ+θ)/D and D is the length of your workday.
I also invoke the Knuth Defence ("I have only proved it correct, not tried it"), and Cunningham's Law.
by antonymoose
0 subcomment
- For me, it’s not a matter of interruption. I’m largely free to dictate my own remote asynchronous schedule and have been for many years.
For me, it’s a nebulous poorly managed product shop with an “everyone owns everything” mentality which in reality means no one owns anything. With 10 engineers and 60 microservrices and GitHub repositories, this makes for an unmanageable, unknowable project.
For me, at least, the lack of the ability to compartmentalize decisions across a knowable domain is the crippling factor in concentration and productivity.
by kelseyfrog
1 subcomments
- If you're suffering from interruptions like this and not practicing some form of Dzogchen or Mahamudra, you're really doing yourself a disservice. Being able to alternate between awareness and non-awareness is a staple of these forms of meditation, and like all skills can be learned over time.
by CGMthrowaway
0 subcomment
- I really like the reframe of controlling notifications/interruptions to minimizing "surprises". Because inside surprises fit not only notifications, but taskswitching, shifting todo lists, head/body movement and even music choices. The effect on the brain is similar for all cases.
- Another take on the matter is: interruptions are inevitable, so reducing the "recovery penalty" is key, and can be learned.
That's something that you learn to do when you have a kid: suddenly, your periods of 4 hours of focus free time (for coding, exploring tech, whatever) during the weekend just _disappear_. You only get max 30 minutes of free time in a day; this is extremely frustrating initially; there is no boss to complain to, no meetings to blame, no solution but to deal with it. Progressively, you learn to switch tasks much more efficiently, by making regular check points, so that you can get interrupted any time and get back to deep work _quickly_.
- While at some point in the optimization game Goodhart’s Law will also apply here,
before that happens I thoroughly enjoyed the insights from reading it and will try implementing some version of it to gauge my productivity before jumping to another metric always aware of the abyss, the ultimate procrastination: being unproductive by trying too hard to optimize productivity.
Unproductivity is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my unproductivity.
I will let it pass through me.
When it is gone, only action will remain.
Jump!
- that's too many words to just say "try to manage your time better".
by mistersquid
0 subcomment
- I found it odd that breaks (e.g. lunch) were not part of the mix.
Hacker News