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Deep Work: A welcome kick in the butt

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Re: Deep Work: A welcome kick in the butt

#61

Post by BeetleB »

ryandrake wrote: post #53
ensignavenger wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-"have to respond soon." What is it about the email that makes you think you have to respond soon? Is it the culture at the company around email? I work at a non-technology Fortune 500 in the IT dept. (I work remote, too) and the general expectation is that we check our email 2-4 times a day. Occasionally I go a day going through my inbox once all day, and it has never been a problem. I suppose it is a company cultur…

Frequent sender of such E-mails chiming in here: Often when there is a response expectation, I'll explicitly say so in the subject, so that if you're scanning your E-mails it will stick out. Will also specify my default assumption should you not respond. I like to be super clear. Company culture is the product of the people who participate in company culture. SUBJ: [Reply needed by 5PM] Deadline for project approval…

I think the part that is missing in your comment is the company expectation on how often people should check their emails. This is why in my interview I specified something like "Morning, after lunch, and before I head home".

If getting an email like yours, sent at 2pm where a reply is needed by 5pm, then the answer to my question should be "No, checking your email at that interval is not OK".

I'm not going to say your expectation is objectively bad or anything. Some businesses may need to work at a fast pace. Just that I would not want to work there if this is the norm. Frankly, in the places I've worked, I didn't see why it had to be through email vs coming to my office or calling me.

Re: Deep Work: A welcome kick in the butt

#62

Post by qwer »

dsschnau wrote: post #10
RUG3Y wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had positive results with pomodoro. I honestly think it's more likely to be useful for people who are worse off than you are and can't focus or manage time. If you can sit and focus on your work without help, you don't need it.

Haha, I wish! I have a notoriously hard time focusing through the day, especially if personal matters are weighing on my mind.

The pomodoro technique makes work easy to start because it's a promise to yourself that it will only be for a limited amount of time. If you break that promise to yourself by not stopping, you've lost the entire point.

Re: Deep Work: A welcome kick in the butt

#63

Post by t594 »

dominotw wrote: post #2

>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…

Been pomodor'ing for 5yrs on/off... what i like about the 25, is it makes it a challenge, like a short race. "Can I really get this done in only 25?" It makes me work harder, and its a short enough time that i know i CAN give 100% focus if i start it with the right mindset.

Also, I never realized how short 25mins actually was. And working like that helps me estimate programming tasks. It used to be that someone would ask, "how long will it take you to do X?" I would always say, "an hour or two". Then I realized how short an hour actually is... only 2 pomodoros... and wow, that went by fast.

If I'm not done with a task, the trick I use for not losing focus between Pomodoros is to leave an easy bug, or purposely break something easy and leave a "//todonext".

I can't remember who, but some famous sculptor used this technique. He would purposely mess up an easy part of his sculpture, so that the next day, he had a "softball" to fix that easily got him back into work mode. (anyone know this phenomenon?)

Re: Deep Work: A welcome kick in the butt

#64

Post by wccrawford »

imesh wrote: post #40
wccrawford wrote: post #35

>Yes, even after work, he makes the case for structuring your leisure activities in a similar fashion. I find that this attitude makes it hard for me to relax. I've always been like this, and while I do derive a certain amount of comfort from it, I find it hard to schedule time to sit and do "whatever", and therefore it's hard to relax during that time. To put it another way: A day at the beach sounds horrifyingly bo…

I wonder, I used to feel that way, but now nothing is better than a full day at the beach truely relaxing and doing absolutely nothing. I wonder if it's because of age or because my job is really burning me out and leaving me with no energy.

Maybe I'll get there, but I hope I don't have to burn out to do it.

Re: Deep Work: A welcome kick in the butt

#65

Post by erikpukinskis »

josephg wrote: post #60
erikpukinskis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it suits your style of programming. My guess is you work in large repositories where you need to keep many complex data structures in your head in order to reason about what the code is doing. That's quite a common way of programming, and it does necessitate large blocks of undistracted time. The Pomodoro/25 minute approach your OP is advocating I think requires that you write software a different way. You ca…

80% of the programming I do is the style you suggest. But ... software development has bifurcated into two skills, and we don't yet have the words to differentiate them. - There's the technician skill, where you poke at your react elements and fiddle with CSS until it looks like the mockup the designers gave you. Every 20 minutes you need to trawl through stackoverflow to find the exact way to use flexbox to get the…

> But all the work I'm most proud of is the second type.

I think if that's true, you should spend your time structuring a back-end such that other people in the organization can take the "technician" stuff off your hands. People who care most about those parts of the codebase. Potentially even non-engineer. Start them in a read-only front end app. It doesn't get you out of the woods, because you still have to support all of those people. But your real job is doing the hard engineering work to create a robust framework which is safe for people to build on top of.

In the long term, you'll spend part of your time basically teaching, and the other part of your time doing that gnarly researchy stuff you love.

And you could eventually opt out of teaching too, if you found someone on your team who likes that work. Then you're just the wizard deep inside the machine making magic happen. Your teammates would probably help. Good people will take as much of the responsibility as they can, since they don't want you as a bottleneck anyway.

Re: Deep Work: A welcome kick in the butt

#66

Post by eicnix »

taway_1212 wrote: post #29
collyw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the main motivations for me wanting remote work.

With remote work, there can be a constant slew of inquiries on Slack, esp. if you're a senior team member. Trivial things take 5-10 minutes to work out on Slack because of how inefficient typing is versus being in the same room. 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 com…

Being able to call somebody and do screensharing helps a lot in this aspect. It isn't the same as sitting together in front of the same computer but way better than solving technical or conceptual issues through text messages.
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