Digital consumption keeps me from getting better at my job

In case the author IS young, I would also add this: Stay away from startups with capricious, absentee or already wealthy founders, find the most productive, stable environment you can.

If you work in an environment where personal production and job security are orthogonal you might find yourself getting rug pulled where effort/contribution are fully decoupled from reward.

Unless you achieve financial escape velocity or end up in an increasingly rare engineering "jobs program" at a large entity, you will get rug pulled at some point due to founder/manager proclivities or due to other macro economic issues.

You are probably screwed if this happens to you young enough as it fucks up motivation, it's why among the older programmer crowd you see some former HS dropouts that started professional work way too young (in the early days of the digital revolution) for a toxic company just completely burn out and fuck up their reward circuitry (it's also part of why 2 round leukemia kids have worse longterm outcomes than 1 round or non-leukemia kids).

You want to already have experienced patterns of good faith behavior and delay your first rug pull as long as possible.

> The closed-door researcher produces more work, but the open-door researcher produces impactful work.

These are not real dichotomies.

Without defending the shortcomings of the focused, closed-door approach, which you seem to take for granted, chasing the zeitgeist and keeping the door open seem to have little do with staying relevant or being impactful.

Relevance and impact are hard to come by altogether, and I think anyone here can think of far more (innumerable) zeitgeist-chasing, open-door-keeping peers who never stumbled upon relevance or impact than those that have. And for as many as they can identify, they could probably find just as many (few) among the focused, closed-door types.

Chasing the zeitgeist might make you feel more relevant, but it's generally deceptive. What happens more often, seemingly, is that you get caught up in the countless ephemeral fashions and distractions that blip into and out of the social consciousness, always finding yourself having just missed the opportunity to play some meaningful role in things. Maybe it's because you arrived at the party too late, or you weren't prepared, or you bet on in the wrong horse again, or somebody else stepped in your way, etc.

Be careful taking for granted that what feels rewarding is actually bringing you closer to your goals. When you keep getting that wrong in the same way, we just call it addiction.

That's not the strict positive you seem to suggest. In creative arts, like many of us practice in software engineering, being 100% focused is not the way to get things done. Your conscious, focused attention can only take you so far, and the best work is often influenced by the weird associations and spontaneous insights that come from setting the work down and doing other things.

Now, that's not to say there isn't some extreme on the other end, where you just never actually sit down and write code or whatever because you're always so distracted, but the sweet spot you want to aim for is somewhere in the middle. For many people, pair (mob??) programming is waaaay too far to one side. Although if it works for you as part of a fuller, balanced, practice, you wouldn't be alone in that yourself.

Deep Work by Cal Newport focuses on these ideas pretty heavily, and he cites plenty of studies to back up his arguments. Like the author of the blogpost says, "There’s no guarantee that what works for them will work for you", but I found my productivity increased noticeably after I applied some of the advice from the book.