There are basically only a few things I agree with in this article, the rest is so shortsighted and heavily tunnel-visioning about some ideal world.

The thing I agree with, yes being distracted takes time, focus and productivity. I'm all for being more into more deep work etc. Also the part of people need to be proactive rings true of course. But I fail to see how something that evident really needs a graph.

But the issue I take with articles like this is that they think of humans as robots. That walk in, or sit in front of their computer at 9, type for 8 and then go home/stop working.

But let's be honest here, If you can keep highly focused for more than 4 hours a day you are a superhuman. I know keeping this in mind doesn't take anything away from the article. Yes we should focus more on Async productivity, but work our work is definitely not single threaded. We are humans, If I hear my teammate 2 desks over signing for the 3rd time I can do 2 things. Ignore it, not getting out of my flow. Or stand up, talk to him/her and see whats up. Maybe it's only a complain about Entity Framework migrations being a b or perhaps just tired, and gets annoying by small things because something happened last night and its time to vent a bit.

recently I've started listening to this podcast https://hurryslowly.co/ . Although I do not identify with everything discussed, I do think there is source of truth in a few episodes. It just makes me consider, are we optimizing the right things first?

I really wonder, if all this no meetings, no distractions is really the key to making us more effective at our jobs. You can't really measure it, does the hour in a meeting really makes you an hour less productive? Is it more like 15 min? Or did the distraction actually helped instead of bashing your head against the wall for over on hour trying to figure out the solution?

I wonder the same about all those gosu vim/emacs users, it sure looks fancy dancing with your fingers doing edits. But where does the real work happen? Is is the amount of lines written or the amount of quality information processed in my mind about the solution I'm looking for?

In the end..

- Be human - Try to have clear borders about distractions in your team - Turn all slack notifications off - Don't have meetings that could have been an email. - Don't send emails about stuff that could have been a meeting

I'm really curious about working in a distributed team though, sadly I didn't really had the chance yet. I think working remote has it own con's and pro's.

I do applause the auther for thinking about this, I think reflecting on how to work better is always a good idea. But It could also easily be a recipe for a burnout.