21–30 of 67 posts
The first part of the book has a really good description of the "modern" work environment and its defects, and how it valorizes superficial work over deep work. I was actually surprised by how identical this description was to my last work environment. - Open space to promote communication and knowledge sharing (and controlling what people are doing), but at the end you are interrupted every 5 minutes by people walki…
i've never seen anyone actually use a pomodoro in real life, and the occasional day i've given it s a shot, I end up thinking "this is silly, I'll just focus on my work". I guess my protest is that it seems silly, especially when I'm focused on something and the timer goes off and I'm supposed to stop. It seems like its adding structure only for the sake of structure. Has anyone actually started using pomo, and stuck…
I've developed razor sharp focus over the years, and pomodoros are like my focus shock absorbers for med/low energy periods or times when I'm most likely to be distracted.
>Extending the length of the 25 minute pomodoro. If I’m in the deep work flow, I’ll continue past the 25 minute alarm. Someone told me that its 25 minutes because it prevents you from building too much context in your head that prevents you from taking a break at 25 min mark. You can't do creative work if your brain is filled with lot of context. eg: TDD goes really well with pomodoro because you are only thinking ab…
I'll be honest; I've never understood this mindset. The idea of purposefully interrupting my flow every 25 minutes, explicitly dropping my context is ghastly. If you could design an ideal hell for me it would involve hard, interesting programming problems and constant (every ~10-20 minute) seemingly random external interruptions. (Its not an accident that I don't have children.) Most of the work I'm really proud of h…
i've never seen anyone actually use a pomodoro in real life, and the occasional day i've given it s a shot, I end up thinking "this is silly, I'll just focus on my work". I guess my protest is that it seems silly, especially when I'm focused on something and the timer goes off and I'm supposed to stop. It seems like its adding structure only for the sake of structure. Has anyone actually started using pomo, and stuck…
i've never seen anyone actually use a pomodoro in real life, and the occasional day i've given it s a shot, I end up thinking "this is silly, I'll just focus on my work". I guess my protest is that it seems silly, especially when I'm focused on something and the timer goes off and I'm supposed to stop. It seems like its adding structure only for the sake of structure. Has anyone actually started using pomo, and stuck…
I usually get carried away and ignore the timer's end.
i've never seen anyone actually use a pomodoro in real life, and the occasional day i've given it s a shot, I end up thinking "this is silly, I'll just focus on my work". I guess my protest is that it seems silly, especially when I'm focused on something and the timer goes off and I'm supposed to stop. It seems like its adding structure only for the sake of structure. Has anyone actually started using pomo, and stuck…
I imagine there's a lot of value in "I won't change from this task until the timer beeps, no matter what happens" and no value at all (or a lot of negative value) in "I will change from this task as soon as the timer beeps". Pomodoro may be something worth adjusting. I do have to try it someday...
The first part of the book has a really good description of the "modern" work environment and its defects, and how it valorizes superficial work over deep work. I was actually surprised by how identical this description was to my last work environment. - Open space to promote communication and knowledge sharing (and controlling what people are doing), but at the end you are interrupted every 5 minutes by people walki…
>People expect you to have Gmail and Slack open all day and to reply in the 5 minutes. When I was looking for my last job, I explicitly queried about this: "Will it be OK if I check my email only 3 times a day (at work)?" In my previous job, too much work was done through email. Person wants me to do some work and return a plot. I send it to him. Within 5-30 minutes, he has a question about it. I have to respond soon…
>Extending the length of the 25 minute pomodoro. If I’m in the deep work flow, I’ll continue past the 25 minute alarm. Someone told me that its 25 minutes because it prevents you from building too much context in your head that prevents you from taking a break at 25 min mark. You can't do creative work if your brain is filled with lot of context. eg: TDD goes really well with pomodoro because you are only thinking ab…
About context, this is from Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers, interviewing John Page, author of the PFS productivity suite, famous in the late 80s.
Lammers: Why are programmers so obsessive?
Page: You constantly try to hold the state of the entire system you're working on in your head. If you lose the mental image, it takes a long time to get back into that state. It's like being an air-traffic controller who has nine planes in his mind and knows exactly where they're all going. Distract him by asking him when his shift is over and he loses those planes--the model he had in his head. In programming, a big complicated model is very efficient once you're in the groove. If you get out of it, you've got to work on it quite a while to get back in.
The first part of the book has a really good description of the "modern" work environment and its defects, and how it valorizes superficial work over deep work. I was actually surprised by how identical this description was to my last work environment. - Open space to promote communication and knowledge sharing (and controlling what people are doing), but at the end you are interrupted every 5 minutes by people walki…
This is one of the main motivations for me wanting remote work.
I guess the ideal situation is to work on something that requires little collaboration, but such positions are very rare.
EDIT: They're even more rare that they could be. In cases where a component could be reasonably written and maintained by a single person, managers will still usually impose a requirement of having at least two or three people involved with that code, which creates large and completely unnecessary communication overhead. The reason is of course they don't want to be dependent on this specific programmer, because then they would have to pay market or above market wage and generally create a developer-friendly environment. They think that it's easier and cheaper to treat developers as replaceable cogs, even if it means they have to subject them to excessive knowledge transfer, thus making them less productive.
>Extending the length of the 25 minute pomodoro. If I’m in the deep work flow, I’ll continue past the 25 minute alarm. Someone told me that its 25 minutes because it prevents you from building too much context in your head that prevents you from taking a break at 25 min mark. You can't do creative work if your brain is filled with lot of context. eg: TDD goes really well with pomodoro because you are only thinking ab…
I think you can, but the big risk is that what you produce becomes incomprehensible to anyone without all that context filling their brain, including you next week.
(Not saying I'm in favour of deliberate interruptions, just that this might be an argument for them.)