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Comment by cancan | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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.

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!

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.

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