If you're suffering from interruptions like this and not practicing some form of Dzogchen or Mahamudra, you're really doing yourself a disservice. Being able to alternate between awareness and non-awareness is a staple of these forms of meditation, and like all skills can be learned over time.
The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#22I found it odd that breaks (e.g. lunch) were not part of the mix.
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#23If you're suffering from interruptions like this and not practicing some form of Dzogchen or Mahamudra, you're really doing yourself a disservice. Being able to alternate between awareness and non-awareness is a staple of these forms of meditation, and like all skills can be learned over time.
This is my first time ever even seeing these words. Any recommendations on how to get started?
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#24Another 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?
this is part of the promise of the Pomodoro Technique. Named after a tomato shaped kitchen timer, the idea is to work for 25 minutes and then stop for 5 and step away from what you were doing, rinse and repeat. Being able to pick back up becomes important.
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#25The model assumes the day begins with focus time. My day always starts with me recovering from the stress of my commute.
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#26While 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…
>>> While at some point in the optimization game Goodhart’s Law will also apply here...
The tools for surveilling and enforcing "collaboration" can probably be reprogrammed to measure "flow."
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#27I 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!
Thank you. Seminal work! I’m already thinking how I will change my day and my teams approach to work.
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#28I remember Jeff Bezos said that something like promoting more communication/collaboration is wrong. And managers should focus on making people working independently.
Silos are so much worse though. Open communication/collaboration is great but needs to be rate limited to enable focused work.
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#29I 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 loo…
Then in your next performance review you get dinged as "not responsive", "not a team player". Trying to work in peace is a in instant loss nowadays, just play the visibility performative game as all the quickly promoted people in office do. Why do you think your management cares about getting things done? If they did they would reward it.
Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
#30When 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…
> When I started working, more than 25 years ago, we had one team meeting per week (1 hour), very few other meetings. When I worked 25 years ago, I had the same experience. But software was way simpler than today. The scale and complexity of current software requires a level of organization and communication that was not needed with simpler needs. Most software run on a PC with probably no internet connection. Updati…
25 years ago internet was as good as everywhere at work and schools in the civilized world and was starting to ramp up in homes. CDs or DVDs were indeed still used for large sets of software and documentation, like stacks of MSDN discs. We even had distibuted source code version control, though it was often only synchronized accross the ocean (e.g. using SERI) overnight.
Personally i like the fact that there are interruptions at work. Working is often a social business and activities like rubber ducking, whiteboarding or live code explanation with living people works wonders for me. It should happen even more.
The people who were coding 8 hours a day, very often were writing yet another framework that they personally came up with to solve a problem, but without duscussing its requirements. More often than not they were making the wrong thing, making too clever things or over engineering.