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The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work

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Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work

#31

Post by antonymoose »

For me, it’s not a matter of interruption. I’m largely free to dictate my own remote asynchronous schedule and have been for many years.

For me, it’s a nebulous poorly managed product shop with an “everyone owns everything” mentality which in reality means no one owns anything. With 10 engineers and 60 microservrices and GitHub repositories, this makes for an unmanageable, unknowable project.

For me, at least, the lack of the ability to compartmentalize decisions across a knowable domain is the crippling factor in concentration and productivity.

Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work

#32

Post by 1970-01-01 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #16
behnamoh wrote: post #10

that'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?

Great management will do that automatically. Meetings will be sent so the team has 3-4 uninterrupted, solid working days with one day strictly dedicated to meetings and/or other interruptions.

Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work

#33

Post by captainkrtek »

skirmish wrote: post #29
captainkrtek wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This has not been my experience at least at the more remote-friendly places I worked. However, I can see this at companies with different culture / pace / attitude.

My most recent role the entire company of ~200 was remote, and so there was rarely the expectation of immediacy in a response. If something was truly urgent you'd be paged.

Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work

#35

Post by belviewreview »

The thing about focused work, at least a lot of it, is that before you start making any progress you first have to remember a whole lot of specifics, like facts, goals, constraints, and so on, and how they all fit together to form the situation you are dealing with and what you are trying to do. And that takes uninterrupted time. If you are interrupted, it all evaporates from your mind and you have to remember them all over again.

It also takes mental energy, which everyone has only so much of each day. If you are interrupted, then all the mental energy you had spent is wasted, and you have less left for the rest of the day.

One more thought. I think the people who don't understand why interrupting is bad are people who they themselves don't know how to think in a sustained, focused manner on a difficult problem. And as a consequence of smartphones, such people are considerably more common than they used to be.

Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work

#36

Post by deepsun »

dblohm7 wrote: post #3
deepsun wrote: post #2

I remember Jeff Bezos said that something like promoting more communication/collaboration is wrong. And managers should focus on making people working independently.

I'd love to see the original source for that one! Kind of ironic given RTO+bullpen approach we're seeing now.

Don't know the true source, but google shows the following quote:

"Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more."

Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work

#37

Post by mejutoco »

cancan wrote: post #18
Noe2097 wrote: post #12

Another 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?

Not OP, but keeping a log of what I am doing helps me get back to it if I lose my train of thought. I use obsidian with daily pages.

Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work

#38

Post by makeitdouble »

jerome-jh wrote: post #5

When 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…

> Managers just trusted you for doing your work.

They didn't. But they also had no viable option to monitor what you're doing and check on it every day.

IMHO white collar workers at that scale was a relatively new phenomenon, and that moment of peace sure didn't last that long.

Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work

#39

Post by Y_Y »

I don't think you need to simulate this, the number of "deep work" slots should be (λD+1)(1-d)^(λD) where d=(Δ+θ)/D and D is the length of your workday.

I also invoke the Knuth Defence ("I have only proved it correct, not tried it"), and Cunningham's Law.

Re: The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work

#40

Post by cancan »

captainkrtek wrote: post #33
skirmish wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This has not been my experience at least at the more remote-friendly places I worked. However, I can see this at companies with different culture / pace / attitude. My most recent role the entire company of ~200 was remote, and so there was rarely the expectation of immediacy in a response. If something was truly urgent you'd be paged.

I have to agree — in general, most people have a good sense of what's urgent or not and with a few kind nudges, they align quickly.
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