Modern work requires attention – constant alerts steal it
stackoverflow.blog
stackoverflow.blog
When I joined the work force in 2000, my life was comparably so stunningly simple. Just a few guys in the same room. Barely any process or documentation. Email was still new so the concept of an outside world barely existed. Chat did not exist, but wouldn't make sense anyway. We talked a bit here and there but 80% was actually doing the work, not talking about it. Management had no idea what we were doing and metric porn did not yet exist.
A lot has changed. More complicated tech stacks means more deeper specializations, requiring more handovers. A lot is outsourced now so you may need vendors to move things. You may have off-shored things. Nobody has clarity on what you need to do, hence you need to hop the organization to find out the details. You need to pass legal and the privacy office. You need to report status constantly to an army of bean counters. Testing has become amazingly complicated and so is system administration.
It requires super human effort to move things by an inch. So no, "collaboration is not a force multiplier". Collaboration isn't a product or outcome. Ideally you'd have an absolute minimum of it. The ideal workflow is that you create a clear and detailed work package, hand it over to the worker, whom you then leave alone to actually do it.
Your companies' purpose is to ship software or whatever else it does, it isn't to ship emails, chat, status updates, approvals and documents.
It is absolutely baffling to me how highly paid office workers' productivity is pissed away like this without intervention. Don't send them to a yoga class to cope, fix the fucking problem. You're setting your money on fire.
It's not to ship software or whatever else, it's to make money. Because without money, you don't have your pay or job and the major reason why you do your job is gone.
Your perspective optimizes for your job and what you enjoy the most, but in most businesses, it's not just the factory and engineers that makes the business, and if you worked diligently on the wrong thing, thats an even worse waste. There are billions of lines of code out there that nobody gives a shit about because their associated business failed. The market doesn't reward the nicest team to work on, they reward winners. The nice team is just a tool to be more likely to win.
If the goal of a company was just to make money, full stop, then all companies would just do the same handful of most-profitable activities. But what we actually see is companies doing an enormous range of different things, with an equally huge range of levels of profitability.
I think it's overly reductive to say that the only purpose a company has is to make money.
Yes, but also no. It's a simplification that is amazingly accurate, it does help to think of different companies as thinking about money on shorter or longer timespans.
As someone working in big tech, I have to say that for certain features I would much rather ship the right 10,000 lines in 6 months than 100,000 lines of the kind of wrong thing. The cost of being even a little wrong at the scale my company operates at is eye-watering.
We had two teams do a bit of what you describe over the course of six months, shipped a lot without building much alignment. We are going to live with the cost of those decisions for a minimum of 5 years.
The lower bound of the cost of working around their mistakes right now is equivalent to... 80 engineer years maybe? Because now we have customers who rely on some insane functionality they built that we are contractually obligated to support (and spiritually want to maintain good faith) and it will infect a bunch of other systems that will now have to integrate with their choices and take on that tech debt.
In the context of this discussion and your comment, wouldn't it be better if those teams were aligned and productive? Is that just not possible in large orgs/software or is it just poor management?
1. Do we have all the information to make the right product decisions now?
2. Do we have all the information to scope all the technical work?
Both are unusual and the second requires the first. It's not that it never happens (A nearby team in my org did it over the last six months) but this has become harder to achieve as the complexity of software has increased.
That means that you might engage in R&D for projects that have a chance to become really big in the future. It can also mean pursuing an ever larger range of smaller profitability projects (still adds to your profit).
This may not be what the CEO is optimizing for. Even assuming a CEO is an all knowing oracle in terms of predicting future profits and even assuming they are aware of all the details of what a large company is working on (hint: they're not either). The rest of the organization has a life of its own as well with individuals optimizing for different things that are rarely in perfect alignment with the company's goals.
On top of all that, shipping software may not be the business driver. Promising things, demos, good salesmanship, may all contribute to a business more than "shipping software". Look at Tesla's "FSD". I.e. it's not even clear that shipping sooner with amazing value/quality to the end user drives the business side that strongly. Often software is not sold directly to the end user. Even when it is the end user may have other things driving their money spending decisions. I would say it likely can be a driver but you also need the kind of organization that is able to leverage that in the market.
So slow productivity in case the direction is wrong? Like he said, ideally, you package up the (correct) work task and hand it off to the worker.
It's staggering how numerous high-profile tech firms are sitting on gargantuan cash reserves, with seemingly no coherent strategy on how to allocate these resources. In the meantime, employees bear the brunt through layoffs, while innovative competition gets steamrolled under the guise of threats.
I'm of the belief that our technological endeavors should fundamentally aim to enhance the human experience in a long-lasting, sustainable manner. A deliberate and well-orchestrated transition to more efficient and equitable ways of operation should be the industry's primary focus, not just an afterthought.
With what resources, votes, arguments, etc.?
Let people have a voice in their workplace. It's so funny to me how Americans wax poetic about republics and democracy until it comes time to talk about their workplaces. Or about how taxes are theft but the surplus value of their labor that is increasingly held captive by faceless NGOs is not discussed.
People should work to live and not the other way around.
Interesting, because the simple life you describe was long in the rearview mirror to me by 2000. It does describe what things were like for me in the '80s, though.
I wonder if the difference isn't time period as much as career experience.
Yep. I had this leave-me-alone experience in the late 2010's. Again in ~2015. Yet again in 2020.
Actually I get this experience any time I join a new organization and am not The Guy for anything yet. I have no idea what's going on, so why would you bother _me_? You wouldn't. You'd let me get on with work.
But as time passes, I know more and more about how things work, who knows what, where things are, what the code is doing, past and future decisions, ... suddenly I'm your best bet to get quick answers to tough questions. Of course you're gonna bother me!
3-letter acronyms are the worst
Just my opinion, but anyone who routinely relies on "quick answers" needs to be kicked in the shin and then fired without severance. They are the swampiest part of the swamp.
just that a vast majority of companies would go out of business
But if you keep asking the same question, then you should be kicked in the shins. And the expert should be kicked for not writing it down or fixing the system after the same questions comes up for the 3rd time.
It still exists in 2023
Though strangely most additions have focused on giving management more control, not more understanding.
Unfortunately, part of those team's success was their ability to work mostly unblocked by the rest of the org. Once process had to accommodate other people's timelines and turn-around expectations, that all went out the window.
Most organizations seem to much prefer optimizing for short-turn around time over sustained throughput.
We have peak micro-managements doctrines, then "just look at the big picture" reaction, then it stagnates in the middle, to go back to one extreme or the other. I think the Agile trend will go away, and there's some companies out of it already, I just don't expect this current trend to last for a half-century either.
After that things got a bit more asynchronous with social networks and the like.
> Chat did not exist, but wouldn't make sense anyway.
Perhaps not to you, but for others it had been around time for some time, along with its problems. Microsoft, for example, distributed WinChat starting with Windows for Workgroups in 1992.
Here's a description of events which took place at Microsoft no later than early 1993, as described in the 1996 book 'Showstopper! : the breakneckrace to create Windows NT and the next generation at Microsoft', https://archive.org/details/showstopperbreak0000zach_p7g1/pa... :
] WinChat was a variant on electronic mail; it allowed two or more people to type messages back and forth as if they spoke on the telephone. These “interactive” conversations were quite popular and illustrated the benefits of a computer network. It was important to test WinChat because NT was supposed to incorporate all Windows networking features. In his memo, Manheim was informing the team that they could use WinChat if they wanted. While his group was testing WinChat, others using it might also turn up problems.
] Manheim’s announcement bothered Cutler. He felt WinChat would distract people from bug fixing. He didn’t want it used. “This isn’t a fun app. It is a waste of time,” he wrote to Manheim. “VMS had this program 10 years ago. It was a waste of time then and it is a waste of time now. Anyone I see wasting their time with [WinChat] is apt to get some verbal abuse.”
] ... Using Winchat “is not a waste of time,” Manheim wrote, his anger rising. “It’s part of the product that will be used by the customers and if it’s trash we'll get shit for it.
] ... I have direct experience with this kind of application at Digital. It is easy to get everyone to sit around and type at each other rather than fixing the bugs they should be fixing. If I had my way we would not ship this app. But then we wouldn’t be compatible with Win 3.1 and we have to do that.
The book also mentions email,
] It was a neat ploy, since colleagues mainly conversed via electronic mail, or e-mail. No matter Whitmer’s whereabouts, his e-mail address remained “Chuckwh.” At Microsoft, e-mail was the most trusted and intimate means of exchanging messages.
It seems like we're in a race and constantly accelerate but does it make sense?
Don't get me wrong, I understand that it makes economic sense to be faster and cheaper than the competition. I also don't mind many of the nice goodies we have nowadays and the progress in medicine etc..
However, I feel like working was more humanely paced back then. It's also possible that I'm just getting old and / or tired (I also suffer from depression and whatnot) which makes me think so fondly of the past.
E.g. the company I'm working at now, they had folder filled with documentation and there were people actually thinking about how the things should work and how some meaningful innovation could be done. Nowadays documentation spread in different versions in numerous teams channels, sharepoint pages, jira, confluence, network shares, git repositories etc. it's really hard to find anything. Lot's of features are being added to the products but without knowing how they're actually being used by the customers, many of them being completely impractical or irrelevant in real life...
Back in the day remote access to customer infrastructure was non existent, so you had to travel a lot and spend countless hours on the phone.
Working with teams overseas was also challenging, there was no Teams, Zoom or Discord, the best you could hope for was Messenger (then Skype) or trying to get everyone on a call.
But most of the stuff was done over email, which is a terrible tool for synchronous communications.
Documentation has become easier to maintain as well.
I agree that many companies are overwhelmed with technology and many of the processes have become redundant, but that's mostly due to poor design and implementation.
A good document management system, good standards and training really improves documentation.
We stopped using network shares for documentation about three years ago.
All of our development,dms,collaboration and communication tools are on Azure.
Not all are perfect and we miss some functionality by being locked out with MS but they all integrate pretty well for the most part.
We recently got rid of the last few line phones in our offices and we are all now 100% on Teams for external communications as well.
As for the human part, that's something really subjective.
I keep my social life almost completely disconnected from work, and although I enjoy the monthly happy hour with colleagues and small talk in the office sometimes, I don't have any personal desire of having human interactions at work.
I've heard this a lot but don't get this complaint. Email wasn't designed to be, meant to be, or supposed to be used as a tool for synchronous communication. So of course it's terrible at it.
The point of email as a tool is to satisfy other goals. It's an excellent replacement for FAX, snail mail letters, etc...
Conference calls, video calls, face-to-face meetings are the tools meant for synchronous communication.
'Chat' tools are completely unnecessary. It's there to satisfy the perceived demands of the workforce but might actually be net negative as several commenters pointed out here.
My regular email, slack notifications from work, and text messages from friends are pretty much all my introverted mind can handle, and even then I still feel out of focus much of the time. Meditating helps considerably, but it feels like I'm swimming upstream.
While I'm not immune to wanting to pull the content slot machine, at least with HN and Reddit I get at least some choice about how I interact with those environments.
I need to somehow massively increase my filtering of which articles I open. I often end up reading 50% of the stories on the front page, plus the comments.
Asking myself that question when I reply to someone who replied to me helps cut that off.
I also picture that meme-ably smug fellow sitting behind a card table with some provoking statement, and the sentence “Prove me wrong.” No, I don’t owe you my time and energy to try changing a mind not interested in changing, but in attracting attention.
For example: https://histre.com/hn/?tags=+programming+python-ai
(disclaimer: mine)
The same trends and style of articles tend to pop up over and over and over. Eventually, most of them just don't resonate. They may be _amazing_ articles, but they'll just be forgotten in my sea of other work if they they're not directly relevant to what I'm working on right now.
Personally, what I don't get is folks wearing smart watches, getting instant notifications when somebody pings them. Its apparently not enough that phone blinks and plays sounds and your desk vibrates, now your wrist has to. How desperately addicted to constant stream of stimuli they are, my boss including (and he still thinks his apple watch are great, but when I sit next to him I see how it fucks him pretty badly, plus its so annoying I want to throw him out through closed window myself and I am not alone).
People still somehow do their job, despite of these semi-useless gizmos, not thanks to them. Yes you can tune it down but for every person doing so there are 10, or more like 100 who don't do it at all. And not only for the case of my boss, it makes them objectively worse workers, employees, friends, parents and overall human beings.
Now I don't receive any notifications. I check my messages too often still, but at least it's on my terms.
I still wear a fitness tracker but now it's just a watch.
> People still somehow do their job
While getting an order of magnitude more emails/DMs than I do, both personally and professionally if they're in management roles. Sounds like hell.
My watch is my primary defense against interruptions. With the watch, I can leave the ringer and vibrator off on my phone entirely. When an alert happens, my watch vibrates once and that's it. It's an intrusion that's easy to ignore when I don't want to be interrupted.
I’ve been using social media apps for years with notifications disabled. I switched phones recently and notifications got re-enabled. The deluge of useless notifications was terrifying.
I routinely go through my day’s notifications and disallow notifications from apps that I don’t want to see. It doesn’t take long to clean them up and it makes a huge difference.
Unfortunately, my worst offenders are Slack and work-related pings by a mile. It only takes a few busybodies to rain notifications down on the team all day long.
Texts, calls, or anything that I might need to see immediately is all that I allow. Emails, ads, and other crap gets canned the first time I see it. If it's not urgent, then I don't need to know about it.
I've even started removing notification noises from my groupchats with my friends, so the notification will let me know there's a conversation happening but I won't be pestered into participating.
I really wish more (any?) chat programs let you know some kind of conversation was happening, but wasn't pinging you every single message. Something like every X hour(s) there's a notification that says "X messages have been received," or when a chat has been idle for an extended period of time, then after X time the first new message comes in I receive a notification for only that first message.
As is, 90% of my chat apps have notifications completely disabled, and I have to manually go in to see if anything has happened.
I remember back in the Good Old Days of Android there was a notification ticker that unintrusively told me that I had gotten a notification and sampled some (or all) of the text.
Now, you can be watching a video and have 1/6th of your screen suddenly change (and repeatedly if, as mentioned, it's an active group chat)
With experience, you'll figure out what works. All you have to do is get started, and you're guaranteed to get better after awhile and be able to start experimenting with your method. You can even do it right now! Don't have time? I read an old maxim once from a buddhist monk: "If you don't have time to meditate for 15 minutes, do it for 30".
Back in the day documentation was the book on your desk and that pretty much was the end of it. At worst you may have had a stack of monthly magazines that could only hold your interest for so long.
If anything during idle time you might have been reading the dustier and darker corners of your system documentation and find a surprise you could use.
https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/silence
It's hard to notice the improvement, a bit like a headache that slowly subsides. But it works. I don't get sidetracked as much. Technology feels less... noisy.
But in context: a coworker needs a piece of information. You are there. You have the information. Asking you saves them 30 minutes. Should they interrupt you?
What if it's 5 minutes? What if it's 15? What is the level of urgency on their end? Is there pedagogical value in them figuring this out without you?
Ultimately interruptions have varying degrees of necessity, and we should be evaluating a team's interruptions as a whole. "Turn off all notifications" might indeed be the proper baseline, but at the end of the day the real thing is team interaction. Is the problem interruptions? Or is it role distribution? Is it knowledge sharing?
It's very easy in a context free situation to apply blanket statements but there's so much nuance to these interactions that I have a hard time establishing any sort of blanket rule. But at the end of the day, people's norms are different, so something needs to be said. "Don't talk to your coworkers" just rubs me the wrong way. It is definitely what is said to many teams who interact with programmers, though.
The way I deal with it is not responding immediately other than by accident. People stop expecting it when you stop doing that. They adapt. And they appreciate when you eventually do respond. Basically asynchronous communication makes responding more efficient. Instead of constantly attention hopping you simply periodically respond to stuff in order of priority. When urgent stuff really needs attention, people will find you.
I turn off notifications/alerts for most things and I simply check when I have some time. Tools and apps begging for attention rank very low on my priority queue of things that need attention. Most email I still receive is actually notifications and not requests for lengthy replies. I rarely use email for discussions of any kind any more. Wrong medium for it. If my phone rings, it's generally a spam call. Most important calls are scheduled. And I prefer taking them on my laptop via a video call. If I don't recognize the number, I don't answer at all.
All this eliminates interruptions of rare moments I have when I can actually focus on something. Focus time is actually blocked in my calendar and I don't allow stuff to creep into that other than by exception. And I strongly encourage people to not even attempt to book meetings with me outside a few dedicated slots I have for that. There's always more stuff to do than I can do. So, it's important to cherry pick and do it well.
This is the answer - the phone rings when it is urgent.
But I agree, overall it was a lot less distractions to get things done. On the other hand, the web had a lot less resources to get things done (this was before Stackoverflow), so if you stumbled into technical issues it took longer to resolve them.
*MSM not MSN
The worst was when a manager insisted I have it on. He was literally 3 cubes away from me (and always present). Why does he need to IM with me?! He was in his 50's, and had spent most of his career without such tools.
Another solution I now use since we're no longer in the office: If you ping me, I'll initiate a voice call. Async with constant notifications is a productivity killer. With a call, there is a fixed end point to the interruption.
In contrast, for the Boss to rattle some misguided text into Slack takes much less effort on the Boss's part and doesn't break the Boss's concentration, but the misunderstanding will be harder to clear up. If there is a back and forth it will take longer and be more distracting and stressful to the engineer, and if there isn't a back and forth the engineer is more likely wondering wtf the Boss is on about.
1. When they waltz over to my cube, they are also interrupting themselves, so they are an order less likely to do it (i.e. do it only when important).
2. IM notifications every few minutes is far more disruptive than a quick 1-5 minute conversation. When he leaves the cube, I can focus. With IM, if I respond, I don't know when, or even if, he will respond. That consumes some of the focus. And an IM session can last 30+ minutes because of the async nature.
3. It's my manager. If he IMs me and I don't respond, and it's important enough, he'll come to my cube anyway (and be annoyed/upset). I can't always know what is important to him or not. So async doesn't really work that well.
4. I don't need the mental burden of tracking which IM sessions have pending responses. Email is much easier to manage. So my policy tends to be: "If I don't respond soon after seeing it, assume it is forgotten and ping me again."
Fake meetings are fine until it is discovered you did a fake meeting. Then you get told not to do that again. They want the appearance of productivity -- they don't want productivity.
I genuinely never had that fear in any of the places I worked at (or heard of one!). If that is a cause for termination or being written up, I'd probably look for some place else.
> Fake meetings are fine until it is discovered you did a fake meeting
My meetings are titled "focus time". It’s purely there to communicate to other team members why I may be unavailable during those time. If people need me during that time, they just ask me beforehand and I’m happy to oblige.
I have empathy though, because I've had to break people's concentrations to urgently ping for information, too. It's always because my boss needed me to urgently get the information, and he's doing it because his boss needs to urgently get the informational and so on. Some senior VP somewhere makes an offhand remark about the status of Project X, and suddenly, 20 different managers are pinging their underlings for urgent information, breaking everyone's concentration.
I remember thinking it was odd that the engineer would think it was OK to be chatting with friends while he was supposed to be working, but I also thought it was odd that the boss was so pissed off about it. It’s not like we didn’t (physically, IRL) chat among ourselves about non-work stuff, too. As long as we were getting our work done, who cares? Now everyone has chat and social media on every device, include their own that they bring with them anywhere, including work.
I also remember that when I was a kid, I was never supposed to interrupt my father at work by calling him, unless it was an absolute real emergency, like the house burning down. Times have changed!
I'm torn on this. Yeah, it'd be great to have a hard line between dev and ops with both groups also having managers to shield them from the business team that protects the mental states of flow of each. But realistically, IME, devs who respond to the ops issues on the features they build directly from the biz people are way more valuable to the bottom line of the company in terms of getting high value work done. Yeah, it's not optimal, but throughput per dev on the aggregate and a deep understanding of the tech vis a vis the actual business needs its serving is really important.
PS: if someone knows who wrote the calendar daemon in macOS, please say hello from me and ensure they know how pathetic I think it is that they managed to spend 70-80% CPU to update calendars. Really? Do them a favor and get them application forms in the "rapid food preparation" industry.
Sure, on an unlimited cap 50mb is no problem. But when roaming it could cost a fortune. Seems like minimising resource usage is often an afterthought, even for Apple.
WhatsApp can send you a push when you get a message, so its usage is ~nothing if you're not sending and receiving messages.
Not being able to set per domain javascript rules is fucking infuriating
Yes, I use lynx as my main browser except for HN. Everything else is lynx.
Further OT: My ex-father-in-law will tell me in SMS or email something to the effect of "Use a graphical browser...[to see this URL]."
I am so glad there is no "Hacker News" app. ;)
Unfortunately, I could tell that I would spend a lot of time on it so I uninstalled it post-haste when the trip was over.
- I block all unscheduled phone calls, whitelisting only parents/SO
- I block all notifications and check apps pull-only
- During work hours I check Slack about once every 30 minutes. (If there's some urgent deadline coming up I might check it a few more times in the evening but that's not the norm)
I wish there was a mute all notifications button on my keyboard like I have a mute mic and mute audio button. Aside from letting me focus, it would be really useful when presenting. Going through a few clicks through the notification center in Windows is a start, but it is too hidden to be obvious to anyone not specifically looking for it and is a bit cumbersome if you flip things on and off frequently.
Totally off-topic, but this fascinated me because it highlighted how differently people regard task size. If I have a task that can be done in about an hour or less, I call that "very small". A small task can be done in a day, a medium in a single-digit number of days.
Just a thing that struck me as interesting.
The discoverability of that shortcut isn't great but it has become one of my favorite macOS features.
Reference:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/how-to-use-focus...
Amusingly, the first thing it does is put a big countdown clock on your screen, counting down the time till your "focus" ends. Otherwise it works pretty well.
That's a pretty useless story for HN, but seemed relevant to the topic at hand, and I like remembering my father in law and telling stories about him (I miss him considerably).
Very little code will still be used a decade later. I have sincere doubts that much that I've produced will endure even half that long. Software is ephemeral. But as you pointed out, quality furniture can last for many decades or even centuries and still be as useful as the day it was built.
Nobody is saying "why aren't our production line employees very active on the #dogsofourworkplace slack channel?"
I believe that people enter the flow state much less today than before smartphones came along.
Of course this doesn't get you promoted at FAANG or whatever but I don't really care much about that. It also doesn't account for annoying parasitic people who don't know how to communicate remotely or don't check documentation / internal KB before asking, but hopefully you hire better people than that :)
> In any company larger than a few people, your own individual work doesn't matter so much - your time is better spent helping other people get their shit done, especially if you know enough to have people be asking you
This fairly obviously can't be true for everyone in an organisation so I wonder which factors affect it in practice - whether it's a function of personality or role, for example.
i don't think i've ever met anyone who had a higher defect rate in their code.
Same colleague sends a chat request. Ignore it cause I'm focused.
Same colleague sends a text message. Ignore it cause I'm focused.
Same colleague actually calls. Ignore it cause I'm focused.
Same colleague walks over to tell you about the email and the chat and the text and the call. But when he gets to your desk, he realizes that he figured out the solution, so breaks your focus to apologize for breaking your focus.
Ass.
So no private notifications during working hours and if I really have to focus, I just turn off email/chat temporarily.
On the other hand, after I finish work, zero work related notifications can reach me.
If you're lucky enough to have creative work where you can deliver the most value by doing focused work all day, then by all means ignore your slack and email. BTW I'm very jealous of your job!
Why can't we just be adult professionals who can decide for themselves when to spend time without distractions and when not to? Surely we need both right?
The problem comes when the manager (or IT or someone else) decides that everyone else has to be available for instant response to the alerts. That violates your "adult professionals" rule, too.
I fear we've already lost this battle and the non-knowledge-worker to knowledge-worker ratio has gotten too high for tech companies/workers to get the cat back in the bag. If anybody has successfully changed a dev team's processes to make changes in the right direction, I'd love to hear how that happened for you. Many people I work with complain about too many meetings and interruptions and yet the expectations which contribute to these problems continue. My org recently adopted having a "no meeting day" every week and without this I don't think I'd ever get anything done.
https://www.yahoo.com/now/shopify-axing-meetings-involving-m...
If you're worried someone's going to try to reach you while you're out for half an hour and be upset that you don't reply sooner, just use the (Slack) built-in feature for that?
I agree about news though - call me 'uninformed' if you want, but I think anyone who tries it quickly learns how little of it matters. (And I was a paying Times (London) subscriber before that, not like I was reading gossip mags, tabloids, and Sky News shock-horror clickbait.) Major stuff makes it to HN anyway.
Better that they never happen. Nothing in the operating system is so important that it needs a toast.
Work notifications for code and chat groups cause so much friggin noise.
I have very little free or down time. If I don't minimize or cut out alerts I cannot make good use of that time.
Alerts add to my cognitive overload and stress. The tighter I lock down my alerts (and inputs) the less stressed I am.
Has it ever been any different?
- Schedule all your work. Schedule when you'll check e-mails, slack, teams. Schedule when you'll have office hours. Schedule when you'll do research. Schedule when you'll pair with someone. Schedule lunch. Your calendar should be booked pretty much every hour of the day, except for meeting day, when you keep a 3-hour window open for meetings.
- Silence all notifications except meeting reminders. Provide an escalation path for use in emergencies. Make e-mail rules, slack rules, etc that will bypass a snoozed notification and go right to you. Put your phone number in your Slack, Teams, Outlook, etc profile.
- When you do have meetings, be strategic. Schedule meetings only when you have already done the work to prepare for them, have an agenda, have done research, and need consensus or troubleshooting. Choose shorter meeting windows, like 15 minutes, 25 minutes, 45 minutes. Have someone keep a timer to remind people before the meeting comes to a close and end it on time. Don't schedule a meeting to find out if you need a meeting. Don't end the meeting without action items and meeting notes. Don't schedule a meeting when an e-mail back-and-forth will do.
- Prioritize working asynchronously. Push back on meetings and calls, and instead ask for details in e-mail, Slack, Jira, Confluence, GitHub Issues/PRs, etc.
- Actually learn how to use your ticketing and wiki system. Don't make it someone else's job to organize your own work. Use the systems to make your work more efficient. Put notes in as you do work, and direct people to go look for your current progress there rather than bug you. Be habitual about keeping status, progress, etc consistently up-to-date. If someone asks for status, point them at a URL to your status updates. If this seems arduous, there are almost always existing tools designed to make it easier.
- Document and publicize your workflow. What your schedule is, how you organize it, how to contact you and under what circumstances. Make sure anyone in your company can find out whether they need to contact you and when and how.
- Try hard not to multitask. If you aren't getting several tickets done per week, your work hasn't been broken up sufficiently, or you're jumping around too much.
- Keep track of your time and work so that you can account for it. Measure toil vs feature work. If the toil goes over 50%, tell your boss, and keep a record of it. After a month of that you should be able to estimate your lost time, extrapolate it out to a year, and show them how much time/money they're losing. If your boss doesn't care, have a skip-level.
If you think any of that is crazy, just remember some of us have been doing Open Source development for 20+ years without meetings. If IRC, pull requests, and mailing lists are good enough to create the foundations of most of the world's software, it's probably good enough for your job.