In my experience Muskovitz was probably three weeks to three months too late in saying no. It's a really hard thing, culturally, socially shutting down people face to face like that is something we are all wired not to do, on top of which he probably derived a lot of personal identity and kudos from being the goto guy - hard to turn off.
But the pressure had to be immense to react like that - and one suspects that it's only because of good well balanced people around that they could take the social shutdown and come back to work still focused instead of suddenly fostering a poisonous atmosphere - something that can easily happen if the no was taken as "no I don't value you" instead of "no we have to find new ways of working"
Would be interesting to hear others views of this formative time.
A lot of this is culture dependent I believe, but i am under the impression that at least on western countries you cannot do this a lot of times without a high cost, specially if you re not a manager.
If someone comes to your desk directly, you are supposed to stop what you are doing and give your attention to that person, even if you are working on something really urgent.
Refusing meeting requests is also not well seen unless you have another appointment, meetnaping happens all the time.
A lot has to do also with open space offices, where everybody is just sitting there and makes it even more awkward, and you are right there available to be interrupted.
Interruptions from persons on your own team are to be taken with even more priority, the modern open office is just a high-interruption environment and there is nothing to be done about it.
In the end it might be really a good thing, because if a person is blocked it walks to the desk of someone else and sometimes can be unblocked and the company as a whole goes forward.
Doing what his boss did of cutting another person off with a 'not now' is not something that his boss can get away with a lot of times, even if he is under pressure: its demoralizing, it just ends up creating a weird atmosphere.
One solution might be: one or two days of remote work a week for everybody.
Your suggested solution makes sense to me. I find myself doing this more and more. The place where I get the least amount of work (at least my work) done is the office, so I tend to work at nights or sometimes simply work from home the entire day.
Some people get personally offended if you don't stop what you are doing to talk to them. I have a feeling that this is harder for people that work for IT departments, because people in other departments don't understand the cost associated to an interruption like that.
It's industry, role, and company dependent more than country dependent.
A lot depends upon what you are paid to deliver. If you're a software engineer, you are paid to deliver working software. You can deliver that software more efficiently if you do not let yourself be interrupted; hence, most good bosses will be okay with a "Shhh, not right now, send me an e-mail" if it's clear you're in the zone on a hard problem. And if you have a bad boss that cares more about attention than results, you should look for a new job anyway.
Same goes for traders, fund managers, and quants in finance - you are paid to make money, and it doesn't matter how rude you are as long as you deliver that.
It most certainly won't work for an administrative assistant, where you are paid to save time for your executive. It won't work for an advertising or marketing exec or salesperson, where you are paid for collaborative, face-to-face interactions. It probably won't even work for a lawyer or investment banking associate, where you are paid to be a partner's bitch.
Again, that depends on your role. Very often (usually depending on seniority) you actually are paid to deliver working code.
There've been times where the most productive use of my time was to answer questions all day long and not write a single line of code. There've also been times where my job was to shield the engineers on my team and intercept anyone who tried to talk to them. But a lot of the time - I am writing the code. If I don't write the code, it won't get written. The guy being paid to deliver solutions is an executive several levels above me on the org chart who's been with the company since he was the one heads-down writing code, and then it's my manager's job to shield me from everyone who wants to talk to me.
Forgive me for being cynical about the whole premise.
Saying no like this can also be used by people that fake being busy. The same way they always walk with a notepad and pens, and other such tricks.
So Dustin said "Not now!", and the author extrapolated this to a parable about how people at Facebook are so dedicated and productive that they are willing to be borderline rude to serve the company.
Dustin said "Not now", and that's it. It does not mean much.
This is company dependent rather than country. When I was early in my career as a software dev I felt like I could never say no. I would continue to take on additional work which translated to more hours.
Eventually my manager at the time did the best thing he could for me. He asked me into his office for a "talk". Then he told me that he didn't want to lose me because I burned out. He said, "Look, you have to learn to say no to people. If you aren't comfortable doing that then tell them to run it by me; and then I'll say no."
This is the solution. Your manager understood his job, and its impact on yours. Everyone should be so lucky. So far, I have been! At my first job, my boss told me right off not to let everyone who comes by add work to my pile. It's hard to do at first. After all, your first reaction is to be helpful. But after a while you see the benefit of being able to to deflect things to your manager and have him prioritize the workload.
Where I work, the entire culture changed from "let's work together to make everything better" to "you drop everything RIGHT NOW if the boss decides that they have a personal project" when a new one took over.
...and so I will be starting my new job in a couple of weeks.
He said "no" because it is normal to assume that what the author was about to say had no contribution toward his priorities. Had it been important enough, he would've know about it. This is a sign that the person say "no" is a great time and resource manager.
Even though it might be difficult, it is some extremely useful and accurate advice.
The overarching point is that you need to focus on what's truly important.
This does not mean you need to be rude or outright say "no" in a blunt or un-tactful way. You can come up with any way you like to manage those interruptions and distractions. The point is that people who truly get things completed usually keep their focus and know how to say no to things that aren't truly important.
It's extremely useful to me at this point in my career, and I can think of others who have the same issue, being constantly busy with less important "now" items and being unable to focus on what I believe is really important. Part of it is the company, the people, and that I'm able to do many things; but most of the problem is in how I manage those inputs, and what I train people to do. It's my responsibility to manage my own time to reach the greatest impact, and in doing that, the company will improve; even for the people who think they needed my time urgently.
I'm a huge systems thinker and I generally try not to blame individuals for problems, but this is something I recognize as being almost totally on me.
It doesn't have to be demoralizing. I oftentimes say not now, shoot me an email, Skype or ask me after lunch. It has created a culture where they interrupt me only if it is urgent enough to warrent I get out of my workflow and have to restart it.
This is also a good reason to make explicit if your "go-to" person in your organization is on the management track or the technical track. This is something I think we struggled with for awhile at Kiva where we didn't make explicit that you could remain technical and still get promoted, so people would become Engineering Mangers only to then expect to still stay in their corner plugging away on code in the zone without interruptions. But when you are the guy tasked to train others and generally help people clear roadblocks (as managers generally are designated to do), then it hurts everyone when you instead try to hang on to a "coder only" mentality. You get frustrated cause you are getting interrupted and the people interrupting you get frustrated by getting brushed off or feeling like they are wasting your time.
Fortunately, we eventually made it clear that you can move up in title, but remain focused on engineering instead of management. This helped tremendously to set it up so we have a set of people who have time set aside specifically for talking about problems, and you can chat with them in order to solve problems while leaving the folks solving code problems alone so they can maintain their productivity.
Apple is at the other extreme - they keep their groups isolated, often behind locked doors. Microsoft used to run recruiting ads for programmers pointing out that their programmers get offices with doors. Google tends to have medium-sized bullpens surrounded by many small glass conference rooms.
From what I've learned of the Gehry-designed FB building, workers will not be able to see from one side of the building to the other because of the conference spaces, pantries, and other various non-workstation zones. The overhead view looks quite a bit more daunting than it actually mat be.
I am thinking of it like some sort of weird combination of the desk arrangements of their old Palo Alto office on the scale of their new Menlo Park campus, only all indoors without the myriad of hallways and walls.
While I agree it's important to learn how to say no sometimes in order to keep priorities and deadlines, I feel though that what is missing in this advice is that you should also learn how to say no in a manner that doesn't generate negativity and a tense atmosphere. It really doesn't take that much to add a sincere smile and say you're busy right now, perhaps a bit later.
We don't quite agree. It is upon the person who is taking it wrongly - that is negative on their part. Everyone should practice saying 'no' without having to explain themselves.
Unlearning your advice is probably the single most beneficial thing I've done during my career as a programmer. While I at my core tend to think exactly the way you do about this, it's a righteous stance that only did me a disservice before I decided to take more responsibility for how I'm heard.
As the person delivering information, you by definition have more context than the person or people you're delivering it to. Asking the world to figure-it-out and expecting them to do so correctly is a path that I think is likely to net-cost you.
I wish I had a little LED at my desk that would sync with my IM status to show people when I was busy or available to chat online or in person. One of the earliest usability features in the online world but still not replicated in the real world.
What if I want to listen to music, but I don't mind someone talking to me if they need something? What if I want to concentrate with no interruptions, including no noise/music from headphones?
For me - I like having headphones on without music because it's kinda warm and lowers outside noise. If I want to listen to something and still indicate I'm available to chat, I only have one headphone over the ear and the other to the side.
My ex-company uses those. They would sync up with our Lync clients and you could even set the color for each status. If anyone is interested I'll ask my old contact there.
They also have an (a bit difficult to find) SDK [1] available, for those not using Skype or Lync. But then there are cheaper [2] or different [3] alternatives if you don't need the existing integrations.
That's funny you mention this. I've been remote full time for over four years now and one of the upsides I didn't expect was that I find it much easier to manage my own distractions than I did in an office. Lots of credit goes to things like the IM status and the ability to hold a reasonable SLA on communications (can you imagine silently waiting 5-10 minutes to turn around and answer a question someone asked you in person?).
It never worked that well in the online world, IME. People used their away status message for the equivalent of Weird Twitter; there was little incentive to proclaim yourself "available." Likewise, there's always the person who goes "ping", "ping" at you, and then you say "what," and then they finally ask a question that you can answer in one sentence.
Better, I find, is just talking at someone with a cultural expectation of high latency in their response, which is true of a lot of IRC channels. In many previous HN threads people have mentioned the chat room format being crucial for their work discussion; you can direct a question at someone, while allowing it to be publicly visible too so that someone else can step in.
Not always. If the people don't understand that someone can't give them immediate attention they are going to email you, send a chat message to say that they emailed you and if you don't reply in 2 minutes they will call you. If you don't answer they walk to your desk, and this was for something that could wait. I have experienced that issue quite a few times already.
I'm willing to give Dustin some sympathy, I don't think any company could ever relate to the amount of rapid growth that was experienced within Facebook back then and is still continuing today. I was put in a similar situation to a much smaller extent and as the team grew it honestly felt like the majority of my job was babysitting rather than accomplishing what I had set out to do.
At the same time it's important to understand that for every no there should also be a yes, and it's just as easy to gently put people down rather than say something that could be construed as rude.
It depends on the situation but I pretty much agree. For example, sometimes coworkers will come up to me to discuss or ask something that'll take less than a minute. These minutes can add up to suck all the productivity out of your day, especially with the context switching.
On the other hand, something that could take a minute for me to answer could take someone an hour to figure out, thus thwarting productivity on the other end.
My previous employer refused to make this culture shift. This was terrible for us engineers because we were supposed to "make ourselves available" to everyone in the company, especially the sales team, when they had questions about the product. The upper management's rationale was that if one of our Account Managers was talking to a prospective customer on the phone and they had a technical question (e.g. "can your solution integrate with Software X?"), being able to answer that question then and there (even if it meant IM'ing one of us engineers) was better for conversion because it gave the customer the impression of competence. On top of that, it was an open-office setup, so there was continuous chatter all the time.
After fighting this culture for years, I couldn't handle the constant interruptions anymore and quit. I have a home office now and I control all the variables in it. I couldn't be happier.
This is actually pretty important, and actually you can do this (probably in a more polite way) to your manager as well. Not wanting to be interrupted = focused. focused = more progress in development.
If you are interrupted in while working on a very complicated subject, going back to the same focus level takes up to 30 minutes for me. The time I could spent on fixing stuff.
I am happy that most of my employers / managers understood and appreciated this.
I learned this the hard way. Joined a company and was on-site in a different country, for 5 days a week, 8 month and we were doing overtime every. single. day. I'm talking 8am to 1am 3 out of 5 days and the rest wasn't that much better.
I quit. Did something else.
8 years ago I joined that very same company again. I'm still a 'corporate drone', a random developer, but I learned to decline and to say no. Both to your managers and to your coworkers.
That single word saved my sanity and allows me to stay with that company to this very day.
I don't agree that it's a matter of culture (at least not in the culture I am roughly familiar with) if you can pull this of. It certainly might be a matter of culture how you need to phrase it.
Fortunately my employer is rather blunt and open internally, so 'No, I really have no patience for that right now' is - while not the friendliest possible answer - acceptable and possible.
Now I need to learn how to walk the fine line between 'saying no' and 'being old and grumpy' :)
> Now I need to learn how to walk the fine line between 'saying no' and 'being old and grumpy' :)
That's the difficult part in my experience. I say no a lot. Some people have the impression that I'm lazy or privileged because they feel they can't say no. They certainly can, but they don't want to feel like they're upsetting anyone.
But sometimes when I say no, I say it in the wrong way, or don't provide enough context for why "no" is right. This doesn't help me at other times, even when I've (mostly) effectively communicated that no is the right decision for the person that's asking me to do something.
In essence, whatever is at #6 or #10 at your priority list is not something that's somewhat important and should be tackled from time to time - it's the very thing that's stealing your time and attention away from your #1 and #2 things, a dangerous distraction that you should consciously limit and either avoid or schedule to a specific time.
You don't have to worry about priority #1001 taking your time - you don't want to do it and so you won't; but things that are seemingly good often lead to "yak-shaving" at the cost of what's truly important for you.
Yep. If the article would have been linked under this sentence instead of the clickbaity "Say No" I would've saved time and energy today by not reading about this annoyingly simple notion.
> Look back on your past week and assemble an honest accounting of your attention. Does the time you spent in each area mirror the importance of that area? This exercise is the true test of your ability to prioritize.
And when you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
I work from home now, but in my days in an office I adopted the following system - a small box on my desk with a green tick on one side and a red cross on the other. Green tick = I can be interrupted at any time, red cross = please interrupt me only for critical emergencies.
In both the old office and my home office I made / make a real effort to set the box to an appropriate value, i.e. don't have the red cross showing all the time or it loses it's meaning. These days it's only my wife who is looking to interrupt me, fortunately, but this system works well. And, hell, one of the benefits of working from home is having your wife 'insist' on taking you away from a 'red cross' task once in a while, heh-heh.
Dan Kennedy already summed up time management in several of his books. Saying no is another way of staying focused but I can tell you it's much harder to implement in real life if you don't have the right habits in place to do so.
95 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadBut the pressure had to be immense to react like that - and one suspects that it's only because of good well balanced people around that they could take the social shutdown and come back to work still focused instead of suddenly fostering a poisonous atmosphere - something that can easily happen if the no was taken as "no I don't value you" instead of "no we have to find new ways of working"
Would be interesting to hear others views of this formative time.
If someone comes to your desk directly, you are supposed to stop what you are doing and give your attention to that person, even if you are working on something really urgent.
Refusing meeting requests is also not well seen unless you have another appointment, meetnaping happens all the time.
A lot has to do also with open space offices, where everybody is just sitting there and makes it even more awkward, and you are right there available to be interrupted.
Interruptions from persons on your own team are to be taken with even more priority, the modern open office is just a high-interruption environment and there is nothing to be done about it.
In the end it might be really a good thing, because if a person is blocked it walks to the desk of someone else and sometimes can be unblocked and the company as a whole goes forward.
Doing what his boss did of cutting another person off with a 'not now' is not something that his boss can get away with a lot of times, even if he is under pressure: its demoralizing, it just ends up creating a weird atmosphere.
One solution might be: one or two days of remote work a week for everybody.
Some people get personally offended if you don't stop what you are doing to talk to them. I have a feeling that this is harder for people that work for IT departments, because people in other departments don't understand the cost associated to an interruption like that.
This cartoon says it all: http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-...
A lot depends upon what you are paid to deliver. If you're a software engineer, you are paid to deliver working software. You can deliver that software more efficiently if you do not let yourself be interrupted; hence, most good bosses will be okay with a "Shhh, not right now, send me an e-mail" if it's clear you're in the zone on a hard problem. And if you have a bad boss that cares more about attention than results, you should look for a new job anyway.
Same goes for traders, fund managers, and quants in finance - you are paid to make money, and it doesn't matter how rude you are as long as you deliver that.
It most certainly won't work for an administrative assistant, where you are paid to save time for your executive. It won't work for an advertising or marketing exec or salesperson, where you are paid for collaborative, face-to-face interactions. It probably won't even work for a lawyer or investment banking associate, where you are paid to be a partner's bitch.
No, you're paid to deliver solutions. Often the best way to get the solution you need is to make sure the N engineers around you are being productive.
There've been times where the most productive use of my time was to answer questions all day long and not write a single line of code. There've also been times where my job was to shield the engineers on my team and intercept anyone who tried to talk to them. But a lot of the time - I am writing the code. If I don't write the code, it won't get written. The guy being paid to deliver solutions is an executive several levels above me on the org chart who's been with the company since he was the one heads-down writing code, and then it's my manager's job to shield me from everyone who wants to talk to me.
Forgive me for being cynical about the whole premise.
Saying no like this can also be used by people that fake being busy. The same way they always walk with a notepad and pens, and other such tricks.
So Dustin said "Not now!", and the author extrapolated this to a parable about how people at Facebook are so dedicated and productive that they are willing to be borderline rude to serve the company.
Dustin said "Not now", and that's it. It does not mean much.
Eventually my manager at the time did the best thing he could for me. He asked me into his office for a "talk". Then he told me that he didn't want to lose me because I burned out. He said, "Look, you have to learn to say no to people. If you aren't comfortable doing that then tell them to run it by me; and then I'll say no."
Where I work, the entire culture changed from "let's work together to make everything better" to "you drop everything RIGHT NOW if the boss decides that they have a personal project" when a new one took over.
...and so I will be starting my new job in a couple of weeks.
The overarching point is that you need to focus on what's truly important.
This does not mean you need to be rude or outright say "no" in a blunt or un-tactful way. You can come up with any way you like to manage those interruptions and distractions. The point is that people who truly get things completed usually keep their focus and know how to say no to things that aren't truly important.
It's extremely useful to me at this point in my career, and I can think of others who have the same issue, being constantly busy with less important "now" items and being unable to focus on what I believe is really important. Part of it is the company, the people, and that I'm able to do many things; but most of the problem is in how I manage those inputs, and what I train people to do. It's my responsibility to manage my own time to reach the greatest impact, and in doing that, the company will improve; even for the people who think they needed my time urgently.
I'm a huge systems thinker and I generally try not to blame individuals for problems, but this is something I recognize as being almost totally on me.
I believe this is what the article is all about.
Fortunately, we eventually made it clear that you can move up in title, but remain focused on engineering instead of management. This helped tremendously to set it up so we have a set of people who have time set aside specifically for talking about problems, and you can chat with them in order to solve problems while leaving the folks solving code problems alone so they can maintain their productivity.
(Floor plan: http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2012/08/dezeen_Frank-Gehry-...)
Apple is at the other extreme - they keep their groups isolated, often behind locked doors. Microsoft used to run recruiting ads for programmers pointing out that their programmers get offices with doors. Google tends to have medium-sized bullpens surrounded by many small glass conference rooms.
I am thinking of it like some sort of weird combination of the desk arrangements of their old Palo Alto office on the scale of their new Menlo Park campus, only all indoors without the myriad of hallways and walls.
As the person delivering information, you by definition have more context than the person or people you're delivering it to. Asking the world to figure-it-out and expecting them to do so correctly is a path that I think is likely to net-cost you.
http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Staff%20Meetings
If you want a more polite version, "I'm sorry not right now."
That's rude, and doesn't actually mean that the refusing party was being productive/busy at the time.
It just means "not now". There could be 100 reasons why.
http://www.blynclight.com/
[1] http://blynclight.proboards.com [2] http://blink1.thingm.com/buy/ [3] https://blinkinlabs.myshopify.com/products/blinkytape-basic
Among other products like this there's definitely a way!
Not great if you don't like wearing headphones though.
Better, I find, is just talking at someone with a cultural expectation of high latency in their response, which is true of a lot of IRC channels. In many previous HN threads people have mentioned the chat room format being crucial for their work discussion; you can direct a question at someone, while allowing it to be publicly visible too so that someone else can step in.
That's awesome.
At the same time it's important to understand that for every no there should also be a yes, and it's just as easy to gently put people down rather than say something that could be construed as rude.
On the other hand, something that could take a minute for me to answer could take someone an hour to figure out, thus thwarting productivity on the other end.
After fighting this culture for years, I couldn't handle the constant interruptions anymore and quit. I have a home office now and I control all the variables in it. I couldn't be happier.
If you are interrupted in while working on a very complicated subject, going back to the same focus level takes up to 30 minutes for me. The time I could spent on fixing stuff.
I am happy that most of my employers / managers understood and appreciated this.
You can explain them with this comic as well: http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-...
I quit. Did something else.
8 years ago I joined that very same company again. I'm still a 'corporate drone', a random developer, but I learned to decline and to say no. Both to your managers and to your coworkers. That single word saved my sanity and allows me to stay with that company to this very day.
I don't agree that it's a matter of culture (at least not in the culture I am roughly familiar with) if you can pull this of. It certainly might be a matter of culture how you need to phrase it.
Fortunately my employer is rather blunt and open internally, so 'No, I really have no patience for that right now' is - while not the friendliest possible answer - acceptable and possible.
Now I need to learn how to walk the fine line between 'saying no' and 'being old and grumpy' :)
That's the difficult part in my experience. I say no a lot. Some people have the impression that I'm lazy or privileged because they feel they can't say no. They certainly can, but they don't want to feel like they're upsetting anyone.
But sometimes when I say no, I say it in the wrong way, or don't provide enough context for why "no" is right. This doesn't help me at other times, even when I've (mostly) effectively communicated that no is the right decision for the person that's asking me to do something.
In essence, whatever is at #6 or #10 at your priority list is not something that's somewhat important and should be tackled from time to time - it's the very thing that's stealing your time and attention away from your #1 and #2 things, a dangerous distraction that you should consciously limit and either avoid or schedule to a specific time.
You don't have to worry about priority #1001 taking your time - you don't want to do it and so you won't; but things that are seemingly good often lead to "yak-shaving" at the cost of what's truly important for you.
This captures the essence of the post, and is almost universally applicable.
And when you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
In both the old office and my home office I made / make a real effort to set the box to an appropriate value, i.e. don't have the red cross showing all the time or it loses it's meaning. These days it's only my wife who is looking to interrupt me, fortunately, but this system works well. And, hell, one of the benefits of working from home is having your wife 'insist' on taking you away from a 'red cross' task once in a while, heh-heh.