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.
I am working in a company that never did the whole agile thing and stuck to project management approaches from the last century. I never thought that Id ever miss Safe and crunchy SCUM.
I think a lot of those problems you describe are less to do with agile, and more to do with communication technology,
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.
This is excellent and aligns with my own experience.
During my day I try to minimize interruptions by batching them. I will largely ignore Slack, and as notifications come in I glance and determine quickly if it really is urgent or if it can wait. If it can wait, I will punt all of those messages to a "remind me later" of a few hours, and get back to my task. I think this keeps my "recovery time" small as I'm not looking too close at these messages. It's not perfect, but definitely helps over pausing my "real work" to fully dive into each notification or ask.
I looked at the simulator mentioned at the end of the post.
The deep work I am often in requires way more than an hour of it and with continuity. This is because a lot of context needs to be held in memory and the loss from interruptions is thereby much higher.
It would have been better if the ranges on the following were wider, hitting may be even 16 hours for the first one below (not kidding).
>> What counts as deep work? 30m 45m 60m
>> How many blocks do you need? 1 2 3
PS: Why limit the range or quanta when the math framework you have painstakingly built allows for more.
That was an excellent piece that bookmarked to come back to it and I took time to read through it. I was only surprised to not find some recommendation on how to reproduce that without going through the whole full conscious self-monitoring.
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_.
Yeah this is something I want to learn more about for sure and is the weakest part of this piece. What have you found that works for you? Or is just that knowing that you’ll get interrupted will force better discipline?
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.
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.
Interruptions are 'breaks' that clear your context memory by drawing it to something else entirely.
An activity like lunch, shower, etc., actually help by giving you moments to ruminate thoughts related to the deep work at hand, help capture the bigger picture and innovate.
I am a respected technologist and am credited with more than 100 inventions. Practically none of those came to me when I was at my workstation. Breaks that are not interruptions can be so good that one should purposefully mandate them into schedule.
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.
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 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.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 75.9 ms ] threadAnd managers should focus on making people working independently.
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.
They didn't. But they also had no viable option to monitor what you're doing and check on it every day.
IMHO white collar workers at that scale was a relatively new phenomenon, and that moment of peace sure didn't last that long.
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!
The tools for surveilling and enforcing "collaboration" can probably be reprogrammed to measure "flow."
During my day I try to minimize interruptions by batching them. I will largely ignore Slack, and as notifications come in I glance and determine quickly if it really is urgent or if it can wait. If it can wait, I will punt all of those messages to a "remind me later" of a few hours, and get back to my task. I think this keeps my "recovery time" small as I'm not looking too close at these messages. It's not perfect, but definitely helps over pausing my "real work" to fully dive into each notification or ask.
I looked at the simulator mentioned at the end of the post.
The deep work I am often in requires way more than an hour of it and with continuity. This is because a lot of context needs to be held in memory and the loss from interruptions is thereby much higher.
It would have been better if the ranges on the following were wider, hitting may be even 16 hours for the first one below (not kidding).
>> What counts as deep work? 30m 45m 60m
>> How many blocks do you need? 1 2 3
PS: Why limit the range or quanta when the math framework you have painstakingly built allows for more.
Thanks.
Anyway, thank you for putting it out there.
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_.
Interruptions are 'breaks' that clear your context memory by drawing it to something else entirely.
An activity like lunch, shower, etc., actually help by giving you moments to ruminate thoughts related to the deep work at hand, help capture the bigger picture and innovate.
I am a respected technologist and am credited with more than 100 inventions. Practically none of those came to me when I was at my workstation. Breaks that are not interruptions can be so good that one should purposefully mandate them into schedule.
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.
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 also invoke the Knuth Defence ("I have only proved it correct, not tried it"), and Cunningham's Law.