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!
The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
11–20 of 48 posts
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#12Another 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_.
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#13I 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.
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#14While 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 brin…
Definitely agree with your assessment. That’s the feeling I wanted to convey at the end. The goal is to make people aware it’s not their fault but they have some things they can try to make things better for them.
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#15I 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!
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.
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#16that's too many words to just say "try to manage your time better".
How many people have control over how their time is managed at the office?
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#17When 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…
>but since communications were expensive, phones were not ringing often. This is a very important point, and it's crucial for people to understand that merely making something more available can have an outsized effect.
TBH, I think covid and the push towards Zoom and others had a similar outsized effect. It made synchronous meetings nearly "free" for many more people.
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#18Another 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…
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?
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#19I 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!
What is Astro? What did you use to make those graphs?
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#20I 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!
What is Astro? What did you use to make those graphs?
Astro is a JS framework for building websites. It’s dynamic enough for my needs but generates static sites.
I’ve built a custom visualization tool for the graphics.