Want to increase developer productivity? Flow is what matters | Hacker News Reader

Want to increase developer productivity? Flow is what matters

karimfanous.substack.com

45 pointskarimfan16 comments

I can't count how many times I've shown up for work excited to continue working on something that's going to have a big impact that I'm really making progress on - only to be interrupted by something trivial and meaningless and by the time I get back around to what I was doing find it stale and uninspiring.

I can't count the number of times I've wanted to to get into flow and couldn't because the dev experience doesn't get enough attention.

... or because my story is vaguely defined I have to stop a few times to get clarification.

... or because I need a decision from several people.

... or because I need help from someone who only checks email twice a day to avoid distraction.

When discussing breaking flow, HN tends to focus almost exclusively on meetings and communication (eg email or slack). These things are a big problem for maintaining flow. But I find they aren't the only thing, and many other flow breakers exist that are solved by meetings or communication.

Imagine how productive you would be if you could magically shift all your meetings and interruptions to only a few days a week and you were able to focus the rest of the week on coding.

To be honest it doesn't bother me being less productive. If my employer pays me to do useless meetings, that's on him. The best I can do is to notify him about the state of things. Being productive or not doesn't matter much to me.

I wouldn’t choose a position meeting for 40 hours every week, even if it came with a pay raise. I enjoy coding and solving abstract problems, and they build the skills I value having (and so does the market).

They do have the right to ask it because they’re paying me, but there comes a point where I’d say no.

Ever since we started working from home, I've come to realise that that's exactly what my wife's job is: constant meetings the whole day.

To me, meetings distract from the real work, for her, they are the real work. Meetings are where decisions are made, but not where product is made. I make product, she makes decisions.

Problem is many workplaces stuff your schedule full of meetings but still expect work to be done, usually by doing the actual work in the evenings or weekends.

With work from home and virtual meetings, it's become surprisingly easy to do work during a meeting.

Wake up. That could be spent on building a skill set which is the most important way to increase the chances of being continually employable.

I couldn’t disagree more. I think you should be at a job to learn skills and gain experience which can be used to advance your career. Short term money is tangential. Also often the impact you have directly affects your compensation, especially in higher level roles, but at the very least affects your cost of living raises, eligibility for promotion, and can shape your overall outlook at the company.

I think if meetings seem useless the right thing to do is talk to your boss until you understand why the meeting is useful, or they understand why it is not useful. Your employer is not paying you to shrug your shoulders and declare you get paid the same either way

Tools are starting to show up that scrape teammates’ calendars and try to defrag everyone’s focus time by rescheduling meetings consecutively.

Could you name any? Asking because was considering making one, thanks.

My boss started using clockwise for this purpose.

I especially love the weekly report showing 25% of my week or less as focus time.

I didn’t want to sound like a shill, but we also.

It's why I prefer to schedule all our meetings immediately after the Daily. (Used to be a Daily Standup, but now it's a sit-down.) I have a tendency to forget afternoon meetings because I'm busy working. (I might still go if I can't work for some reason.)

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