23 ms·

This shouldn't come across as flippant but how can you be productive if you never think deeply?

• piinbinary 6y ago
  I think I get what you mean. To me, it's a matter of degree. Reading slack, reading emails, 1:1s, project sync meetings, merging PRs, etc all require nearly no depth of thinking. Creating a design for a small problem or understanding unfamiliar code requires a bit more, debugging more still. The possibility (and actuality) of interruptions is also a matter of degree. A day with one meeting after lunch and nothing on fire allows for deeper focus than a day with nothing but 30 minute gaps between meetings and 15 people on Slack all wanting something. The deepest thinking - the kind that is best suited to having an entire day of space - helps the most with the hardest problems: planning a complex project, understanding a new bit of type theory, etc. (And it is not necessarily true that these problems are impossible to solve in the face of distractions, but a day of focus might match the output of a distracted week - and sometimes it's hard to budget a whole week just to think about something!) edit: s/is only strictly necessary for the hardest problems/helps the most with the hardest problems/