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You lose two hours of productivity if someone interrupts you with random information? I also have trouble getting back into the flow of where I was, but I thin

You lose two hours of productivity if someone interrupts you with random information? I also have trouble getting back into the flow of where I was, but I think 30 minutes would be my max lost productivity.

randomdata 5y ago
One hour to build up the universe, only to have it shattered. One more hour to get you back to where you were. I feel your assessment of 30 minutes to build the universe in the purest sense is fair, but I'm not sure it accounts for the additional friction involved. You might be the exception, but humans in general are known to avoid building up the universe, so to speak, if they anticipate an interruption. It takes even more time for the mind to accept that the time is right. And so, all told, I think two hours is quite reasonable.
Silhouette 5y ago
There has been research in this area. It's shocking (in both the literal and figurative sense) how much time is wasted by interruptions for people who do "thought work" like software development. If you have a daily standup around 10am, like the last place I had them, it's possible that you have instantly reduced the effective productivity of your entire team by 20% or even more. Of course that is in addition to all the other costs that come with standups. For example any fixed daily meeting kills the possibility of flexible working hours. That is one of the top perks for many developers and some developers are also much more productive working at non-traditional times. The standup meeting can also feel like an inquisition, particularly for juniors or new starters. It doesn't even have to be the classic manager-holding-court effect, just whoever is leading the meeting having a bad day and speaking in the wrong tone. Again, there goes your productivity for that person for possibly the entire rest of the day. If anyone reading this does use daily standups and everyone on their team wants to then that's great. Every team is different and doing what works for your team is what matters. But personally I have found that while sometimes useful points do arise during standups the benefits are greatly exaggerated. Valuable insights and awesome collaborations do not happen anything like often enough to justify all the downsides of the meetings, not least because IME the same information would probably have been passed on some other way and often faster in any moderately functional development team anyway.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Most people have no idea what a productive standup looks like. I was on a team once where we had a standup on Monday mornings. Fucking beautiful meeting. Of course, a new dev manager killed it for some god forsaken reason. That meeting prevented so much bullshit. That manager ended up getting the boot because...chaos and lack of productivity. Now every where I go some douchebag paranoid manager has established daily stand-ups because it makes them feel better. I resent telling people I'm working on a story we all groomed together and brought into the Sprint....it's right on the board: In progress, In Review, Ready for acceptance, Done. Clear as day. I'm still working on X, gonna work on X some more...everything is going great. Not adult-like behavior.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    Most people have no idea what a productive standup looks like. Given how common standups seem to have become, that probably tells us something. Maybe the typical daily standup as widely advocated isn't usually productive and it's actually some variations used by some individual teams that have been more worthwhile for those specific teams?
    - randomdata 5y ago
      My wife works in healthcare and has a daily standup. They use that time to go over what work will be done that day, which largely cannot be predicted far in advance as it is dependent on patient bookings. This brings novel information. Fundamentally, that is also the idea pushed in software. A chance to talk about what needs to be done that day. But, in my experience, tech companies also schedule planning meetings. That is where it is determined what will be done for the next while (two weeks seems to be a common cadence) and after that the course is set. There is nothing else to talk about, unless someone has a problem, and when someone has a problem (assuming your team is functional) they reach out when they have a problem, not wait until a prescribed time 23.75 hours later. That means there is no additional information to give in the standup, and thus this is likely the source of why standups end up being pointless the vast majority of the time in tech. The healthcare case, on the other hand, provides clear value. There are likely some cases where tech teams suffer from no direction, void of an idea of what needs to be done before the moment it needs to happen. I imagine that overlaps with tech that is dysfunctional. A productive standup does not exactly seem like something to strive for, but if all you have is a bandaid...
ipaddr 5y ago
Yes and I'm surprised by how many non programmers fail to understand this.
jjav 5y ago
Research has shown that it takes over 20 minutes to recover from an interruption, so basically half hour lost is about right. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/06/01/interruptions-at-work-can-cost-you-up-to-6-hours-a-day-heres-how-to-avoid-them/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/06...

randomdata 5y ago

One hour to build up the universe, only to have it shattered. One more hour to get you back to where you were. I feel your assessment of 30 minutes to build the universe in the purest sense is fair, but I'm not sure it accounts for the additional friction involved. You might be the exception, but humans in general are known to avoid building up the universe, so to speak, if they anticipate an interruption. It takes even more time for the mind to accept that the time is right. And so, all told, I think two hours is quite reasonable.

Silhouette 5y ago

There has been research in this area. It's shocking (in both the literal and figurative sense) how much time is wasted by interruptions for people who do "thought work" like software development. If you have a daily standup around 10am, like the last place I had them, it's possible that you have instantly reduced the effective productivity of your entire team by 20% or even more. Of course that is in addition to all the other costs that come with standups. For example any fixed daily meeting kills the possibility of flexible working hours. That is one of the top perks for many developers and some developers are also much more productive working at non-traditional times. The standup meeting can also feel like an inquisition, particularly for juniors or new starters. It doesn't even have to be the classic manager-holding-court effect, just whoever is leading the meeting having a bad day and speaking in the wrong tone. Again, there goes your productivity for that person for possibly the entire rest of the day. If anyone reading this does use daily standups and everyone on their team wants to then that's great. Every team is different and doing what works for your team is what matters. But personally I have found that while sometimes useful points do arise during standups the benefits are greatly exaggerated. Valuable insights and awesome collaborations do not happen anything like often enough to justify all the downsides of the meetings, not least because IME the same information would probably have been passed on some other way and often faster in any moderately functional development team anyway.

datavirtue 5y ago
Most people have no idea what a productive standup looks like. I was on a team once where we had a standup on Monday mornings. Fucking beautiful meeting. Of course, a new dev manager killed it for some god forsaken reason. That meeting prevented so much bullshit. That manager ended up getting the boot because...chaos and lack of productivity. Now every where I go some douchebag paranoid manager has established daily stand-ups because it makes them feel better. I resent telling people I'm working on a story we all groomed together and brought into the Sprint....it's right on the board: In progress, In Review, Ready for acceptance, Done. Clear as day. I'm still working on X, gonna work on X some more...everything is going great. Not adult-like behavior.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  Most people have no idea what a productive standup looks like. Given how common standups seem to have become, that probably tells us something. Maybe the typical daily standup as widely advocated isn't usually productive and it's actually some variations used by some individual teams that have been more worthwhile for those specific teams?
  - randomdata 5y ago
    My wife works in healthcare and has a daily standup. They use that time to go over what work will be done that day, which largely cannot be predicted far in advance as it is dependent on patient bookings. This brings novel information. Fundamentally, that is also the idea pushed in software. A chance to talk about what needs to be done that day. But, in my experience, tech companies also schedule planning meetings. That is where it is determined what will be done for the next while (two weeks seems to be a common cadence) and after that the course is set. There is nothing else to talk about, unless someone has a problem, and when someone has a problem (assuming your team is functional) they reach out when they have a problem, not wait until a prescribed time 23.75 hours later. That means there is no additional information to give in the standup, and thus this is likely the source of why standups end up being pointless the vast majority of the time in tech. The healthcare case, on the other hand, provides clear value. There are likely some cases where tech teams suffer from no direction, void of an idea of what needs to be done before the moment it needs to happen. I imagine that overlaps with tech that is dysfunctional. A productive standup does not exactly seem like something to strive for, but if all you have is a bandaid...

ipaddr 5y ago

Yes and I'm surprised by how many non programmers fail to understand this.

jjav 5y ago

Research has shown that it takes over 20 minutes to recover from an interruption, so basically half hour lost is about right. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/06/01/interruptions-at-work-can-cost-you-up-to-6-hours-a-day-heres-how-to-avoid-them/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/06...