Hacker News Reader

Comment by Teridee | Hacker News Reader

At my company, we have daily standups and they throw off my whole morning. I only really work effectively when I am left to it and so have outlook/slack/messages turned off during periods where I am trying to focus - has got me in trouble with management a few times but I am not sure what else i can do.

The piece was a good read but its so personal to me that it doesn't really help sadly.

View on HN

This exact complaint is very common among juniors I’ve mentored: A single meeting can destroy their productivity for hours following the meeting.

The most successful advice I’ve found is to find a way to reset after meetings without using your computer. For whatever reason, they’re emotionally drained after meetings. They get back to their computer and reach for Reddit or Twitter or something for a low effort snack, which then spirals into an hour or more of doomscrolling or distractions. This then translates into self disappointment at their low productivity, which further drives them to seek more cheap online entertainment and the cycle repeats.

So try something else. After your standup, go for a walk. Don’t use your phone. Do some stretches if you WFH or have a quiet place. Whatever you do, don’t fall into the rut that destroys your productivity.

This is an under-rated comment. I had a similar revelation that eventually led to the conclusion that the computer is a crucial part of the distraction, and that many activities are best performed at least partly without it. Examples include:

- taking breaks

- thinking through a problem

Taking a walk is a good way to combine the two.

Amen. Being inside all day is the other big factor, it seems.

I've tried all these tips and more. I've gone as far as taking a run after meetings. Nothing really works. I've come to conclude that the problem is the meeting itself, not the way you recuperate from it.

I don't have ADHD but I also get destroyed by meetings. I'm not sure if it's the fact that I was in a deep flow just before the meeting and it was near impossible to fully disconnect and actually be present or that I felt the meeting itself was a waste of time and the realisation I just clocked in 1hr of unproductive work. Often it's a combination of both and it can be quite distressing mentally.

Regardless I would never allow myself to browse anything not work related when I'm actually working (i.e. twitter, reddit) even when I'm "destroyed". I think cutting the unproductive crap out completely when working and trying to find more healthy coping mechanisms is far better.

I suspect the juniors are taking the meetings too seriously, and getting stressed during the meeting to the point that it's difficult to transition away after.

I've had this problem too. But now that I have more meetings, it's become much easier to transition back to focused work. It's only the occasional more-stressful-than-usual meeting that eats up my attention for hours afterwards.

I don't know what the solution is for most people. I guess this is why some people who transition manager --> IC can be so effective.

Standups kind of destroy my flow as well. HOWEVER:

- Everything destroys my flow anyway. So $#&#$% fragile.

- Standups are 100x less destructive to my flow than random unscheduled synchronous communication.

- For management and collaboration purposes, I recognize the need for some kind of synchronous communication for most projects/jobs.

- When working remotely I've found video standups help keep me feeling connected to humanity.

- Most teams I've been on are quite understanding if you choose to miss standup and offer an update via Slack instead because you're "in the zone."

So.... they suck, but they have upsides for me, and I accept them as kind of a "least-bad compromise solution."

This is because your brain is like ChatGPT: it's in a loop generating the next symbol based on the prior context. You need to load the context up, then you're ready to generate symbols. If there's a BS meeting, all that context is paged out and now you need to re-load it. Plus there are motivational aspects that make "loading context some AH manager just blew out my brain" more difficult.

That's a bummer. My team does standup at 3 PM (we're also bi-costal), but I let the teams chose their time, and this is what one particular team chose. Maybe talk to some of your teammates, and maybe you all decide you want an afternoon standup, so you can hit the ground running in the morning for a few hours, before the interruptions start.

This is extra useful if your mornings are left for you to continue working on any problem where you had the chance to "sleep on it".

I found that standups help crystallize social consequences in my VM prefrontal cortex so they help keep me honest.

Haha yes

Depends on where you are, but you can often get by, ignoring directives from management, if you are an active communicator and you’re completing assigned tasks.

It’s still better to state your problem. I like to use the “non-violent communication” as a template. Something like, “When we have the standup, I have a hard time refocusing on work afterwards. I’m concerned about the impact this has on my productivity. Can I send status updates via Slack?”

I’m not gonna pretend that this is a solution to your problem; I just want to sympathize and have a conversation about some of the strategies that we can use to fix problems with management that interfere with technical work.

I'm the opposite. I have ADHD and I function much better with meetings, talking it out with other programmers, and the cacophony of noise from an open office. Everything distracts me anyway, so I'd rather it be work stuff than my own thoughts about some awkward moment I had in 1995.

It's probably because this is not an ADHD issue, but just a difference amongst individuals. I have ADHD and meetings do not really seem to impact my functions other than increasing urgency because I have Total Time - Meeting Time left to do whatever task..

> has got me in trouble with management a few times but I am not sure what else i can do

Don't worry about it. I think this is good advice for any software engineer. Eventually you'll be senior enough or on a different team and it won't be a problem.

Agreed, I'd add to give your manager your phone number for emergencies and tell them you've allow-listed their number to ring when others can't. Then get back to flow

That sounds like a terrible idea to me, I'd never want to do that. If they like the work I do, management should learn to respect the way I do it.

Sometimes there are genuine emergencies. If your company got hacked and is all hands on deck, you kinda have to be interrupted. There are situations in which emergencies may not be paged through normal systems.

If you have the kind of clueless/toxic manager who is going to abuse this sort of arrangement, they are probably never going to agree to this sort of arrangement in this first place.

For nearly all working relationships, I think it's reasonable to keep an emergency communication channel open.

If you like the company/team enough to work there, you should learn to respect the way it operates.

Hopefully it doesn't sound too combative, but I wanted to express that it's a two way street and compromises have to be found. I dislike various things in my company on a personal level, but often make sense from company/team point of view.

daily check-in throws off my morning too. i have an hour from when i start til check-in, which is not enough time to get into deep work. looking forward to moving to a new timezone where i can take advantage of that timing with two hours before check-in.

WFH encourages scheduled meetings. It's a nightmare. I'd much rather just get an interruption out of the blue than have someone schedule a meeting to talk to me, because in the run-up to the meeting I won't try to start anything (what's the point if I've got a pending interruption?) At least my standups are first thing in the morning.

I don't understand it. My company is fully remote but they are absolutely horrendous at async comms. I was trying to walk someone through adding a docker build process to their CI and.... he just couldn't communicate/understand it through slack and he wanted to schedule a meeting. Great, now instead of being able to respond while working on other things I have to cut out an entire hour of my day just for you.

Thanks.

Beyond that I refuse to do daily standups. I'll quit a company if they won't let me do async or communicate through slack. I'm not logging in and the start of my day being a meeting every single day. Absolutely not. I've been there before.

Interesting. I like the daily meeting - gives me an anchor for my day that works with the meds. But like most ADHD people when unmedicated I get more productive at night, so I can see why you'd hate the daily checkin.

I'm about 20 years in and the first 10 years of my career as a SWE I had absolutely horrendous managers and daily checkins felt more like proving to someone that you had done any work the day prior, shaming you if you didn't produce enough. I have a hugely negative connotation to them even today, vs feeling that they're a positive team-collab sort of scenario.

At two companies the actual CEO and CTO were in every single one of our standups (startups of course).

It's funny how good (or shitty) experiences shape things. I like peer reviews and regular 1:1s with management. I've had good experiences with them, and have sorely missed them at jobs where they didn't happen.

But I know good engineers (who are also good communicators) that loathe them with a great passion.

Idk if that has to do with async working. People pull that kind of stuff in office too. "Hey I don't get this, can we schedule some time so we can /you just do this for me " then you sit at a conference table or at their desk for an hour lol

that's unfortunate, you have 20 years of experience but don't want to pair program or help out other developers.

I'm a Staff SRE. I literally mentor an entire SRE team every single day.

I didn't say a single thing about paired programming. Christ. Did I say that the dev wanted to pair program? No, I didn't. I would have happily hopped in a huddle with him as OPPOSED to scheduling a meeting 3 days later.

I am sick of meetings and people who are incapable of working async, especially when we're in different timezones, which is exactly what this thread I'm responding to is about.

> I was trying to walk someone through adding a docker build process to their CI and.... he just couldn't communicate/understand it through slack and he wanted to schedule a meeting.

this sounds like pair programming imo.

> Great, now instead of being able to respond while working on other things I have to cut out an entire hour of my day just for you.

this reads as a bad attitude towards mentorship. sorry for that assumption.

Nope, I love mentoring.

My frustration is not knocking this out over 10 slack messages right now and having to round back to it days later. I want it done and off my plate.

I'm ADHD. I don't want lingering tasks floating around giving me anxiety when they can be done quickly. I'm going to forget it exists until 10 minutes before when it pops up on my notifications, then I'll have to context switch over to that situation.

One of my biggest coping mechanisms is as soon as something pops into my mind I do it RIGHT NOW. If I walk by the laundry basket and think of doing laundry I grab it and do it RIGHT now. Or I'll just walk by it for a week completely oblivious to it.

i feel you. thanks for sharing your working style. i'm sorry i misread your comment.

    I'd much rather just get an interruption out of the 
    blue than have someone schedule a meeting to talk to me

After 15+ years of exploring my own ADHD and learning about others' experiences, I'm still constantly wowed by how differently we all react to this stuff.

For me, out-of-the-blue interruptions are a worst case scenario for my ADHD. It's very hard for me to get into the "flow" if I know that I might be interrupted at any moment. I prefer scheduled meetings as a less-evil alternative.

But many many feel similarly to you.

In my experience scheduled meetings tend to be longer and involve more people than necessarily.

Also, somewhat contraintuitively, I often avoid starting some new work e. g. 30 minutes before a scheduled meeting, meanwhile without it I just start, and if interruption happens,... it just happens.

    Also, somewhat contraintuitively, I often avoid 
    starting some new work e. g. 30 minutes before a 
    scheduled meeting

No, I think that makes sense and is pretty common.

It's hard for me to get into the zone if I know I've got a hard stop in 30 minutes.

Two workarounds for me. One is that I tell myself I'll spend the final 5 minutes jotting down todo's so I can pick back up relatively close to where I left off. I normally work in 20-30 min bursts anyway. This is actually not super successful for me but better than nothing.

Slightly more effective for me is using those 30 minutes to bang out some smaller tasks. Review a small pull request. Pay a bill or two. Apply some software updates. Gotta be done eventually so I get them out of the way now, in service of more focus time later.

we changed our standups to right after lunch and this has helped for everyone

Reply on news.ycombinator.com