The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work | Hacker News Reader

The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work

justoffbyone.com

204 points0x79de47 comments

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 would start with "may I disturb you?", and the answer may have been "give me five minutes". We had like 2-3 emails a day. It turns out someone had the radio in the office. That was in Belgium and the radio was in Flemish. This was not a big deal since I do not understand Flemish. Despite being rather cramped, I remember this office as quiet. It was not a large open-space though.

I cannot remember the turning point. Of course "agile" did a lot of damage, then ticketing systems, the illusion that developers are swap-able, and now constant notification stream.

Pretty similar to my first couple of jobs. We didn’t even have email. To document when something was done, we printed a diff and wrote a memo, which went into a file (i.e. a folder in a drawer) for that project.

>but since communications were expensive, phones were not ringing often.

This is a very important point, and it's crucial for people to understand that merely making something more available can have an outsized effect.

TBH, I think covid and the push towards Zoom and others had a similar outsized effect. It made synchronous meetings nearly "free" for many more people.

> When I started working, more than 25 years ago, we had one team meeting per week (1 hour), very few other meetings.

When I worked 25 years ago, I had the same experience. But software was way simpler than today. The scale and complexity of current software requires a level of organization and communication that was not needed with simpler needs.

Most software run on a PC with probably no internet connection. Updating the software required to send discs by mail. Everything was slower, and probably more robust. Maybe banking was closer to what we have now, but it was still slower and there were way less transactions.

In contrast, my last 3 jobs required backend services available 24/7 to serve millions of users worldwide. We had many data providers, and we provided services to dozens of big corporations. We had teams dedicated to just integrate to all the partners, wallets, data providers, etc.

Increased complexity requires more communication and more meetings, and more time dedicated to synch all that development. If anyone wants old-style ways of working, with more time coding and less meetings I would recommend to go to small companies with limited reach. Their problems are going to be easier managed by a few developers that can focus on creating new things instead of getting up to date with all the complexity that a big corporation requires.

25 years ago internet was as good as everywhere at work and schools in the civilized world and was starting to ramp up in homes. CDs or DVDs were indeed still used for large sets of software and documentation, like stacks of MSDN discs. We even had distibuted source code version control, though it was often only synchronized accross the ocean (e.g. using SERI) overnight.

Personally i like the fact that there are interruptions at work. Working is often a social business and activities like rubber ducking, whiteboarding or live code explanation with living people works wonders for me. It should happen even more.

The people who were coding 8 hours a day, very often were writing yet another framework that they personally came up with to solve a problem, but without duscussing its requirements. More often than not they were making the wrong thing, making too clever things or over engineering.

> 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.

I am working in a company that never did the whole agile thing and stuck to project management approaches from the last century. I never thought that Id ever miss Safe and crunchy SCUM. I think a lot of those problems you describe are less to do with agile, and more to do with communication technology,

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.

The model assumes the day begins with focus time. My day always starts with me recovering from the stress of my commute.

I am the author of this piece. It was something I put together as a curiosity and wanted to play with Astro. Hope you all enjoyed it!

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 looking too close at these messages. It's not perfect, but definitely helps over pausing my "real work" to fully dive into each notification or ask.

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.

What is Astro? What did you use to make those graphs?

Astro is a JS framework for building websites. It’s dynamic enough for my needs but generates static sites.

I’ve built a custom visualization tool for the graphics.

Thank you. Seminal work! I’m already thinking how I will change my day and my teams approach to work.

Thank you, you are very kind!

Hi Can,

I looked at the simulator mentioned at the end of the post.

The deep work I am often in requires way more than an hour of it and with continuity. This is because a lot of context needs to be held in memory and the loss from interruptions is thereby much higher.

It would have been better if the ranges on the following were wider, hitting may be even 16 hours for the first one below (not kidding).

>> What counts as deep work? 30m 45m 60m

>> How many blocks do you need? 1 2 3

PS: Why limit the range or quanta when the math framework you have painstakingly built allows for more.

Thanks.

That was an excellent piece that bookmarked to come back to it and I took time to read through it. I was only surprised to not find some recommendation on how to reproduce that without going through the whole full conscious self-monitoring.

Anyway, thank you for putting it out there.

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."

He's also no longer in charge.

See also Apple where quotes from previous CEOs no longer apply.

I would say both are good, but collaboration should happen naturally. You cant force it. If I want help I'll ask for help, if I want to brainstorm I'll ask a colleague to brainstorm.

Most of the time I just want people to leave me alone so I can get stuff done.

Silos are so much worse though. Open communication/collaboration is great but needs to be rate limited to enable focused work.

That’s why we have daily and other “ceremonies”.

But if I get $1 for every comment nagging about daily standups I would be rich.

I guess the ones nagging about daily rather be interrupted every 30 mins.

Sometimes there is this guy like we had a guy who would come over at me before I took my jacket off in office with “quick question” - FFS we have daily for that.

Want to have a cake and wish happy birthday, just got back from vacay and want tell all amazing stories? FFS do it after daily not when you come in and with every person separately.

You have a question/celebration/fluff - do it after daily meeting.

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.

If you're suffering from interruptions like this and not practicing some form of Dzogchen or Mahamudra, you're really doing yourself a disservice. Being able to alternate between awareness and non-awareness is a staple of these forms of meditation, and like all skills can be learned over time.

This is my first time ever even seeing these words. Any recommendations on how to get started?

I really like the reframe of controlling notifications/interruptions to minimizing "surprises". Because inside surprises fit not only notifications, but taskswitching, shifting todo lists, head/body movement and even music choices. The effect on the brain is similar for all cases.

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 to complain to, no meetings to blame, no solution but to deal with it. Progressively, you learn to switch tasks much more efficiently, by making regular check points, so that you can get interrupted any time and get back to deep work _quickly_.

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?

this is part of the promise of the Pomodoro Technique. Named after a tomato shaped kitchen timer, the idea is to work for 25 minutes and then stop for 5 and step away from what you were doing, rinse and repeat. Being able to pick back up becomes important.

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.

While at some point in the optimization game Goodhart’s Law will also apply here, before that happens I thoroughly enjoyed the insights from reading it and will try implementing some version of it to gauge my productivity before jumping to another metric always aware of the abyss, the ultimate procrastination: being unproductive by trying too hard to optimize productivity.

Unproductivity is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my unproductivity. I will let it pass through me. When it is gone, only action will remain.

Jump!

Definitely agree with your assessment. That’s the feeling I wanted to convey at the end. The goal is to make people aware it’s not their fault but they have some things they can try to make things better for them.

>>> While at some point in the optimization game Goodhart’s Law will also apply here...

The tools for surveilling and enforcing "collaboration" can probably be reprogrammed to measure "flow."

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.

I found it odd that breaks (e.g. lunch) were not part of the mix.

Interruptions are 'breaks' that clear your context memory by drawing it to something else entirely.

An activity like lunch, shower, etc., actually help by giving you moments to ruminate thoughts related to the deep work at hand, help capture the bigger picture and innovate.

I am a respected technologist and am credited with more than 100 inventions. Practically none of those came to me when I was at my workstation. Breaks that are not interruptions can be so good that one should purposefully mandate them into schedule.

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.

Rephrasing the original question then -- Where do I find great management? :-)

Or the other alternative which is that most people simply don't care about what they do for a living.

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