14 ms·

Modern work requires attention – constant alerts steal it

• sacnoradhq 3y ago
  Slack (and all of the alike - Basecamp, HipChat, FlowDock, MS Teams, etc.) is the death of productivity. At least with email, there was a delay. Work notifications for code and chat groups cause so much friggin noise.
• ativzzz 3y ago
  I am totally on the other side of this - I would much rather get my work interrupted to unblock a colleague than to pretend that anything I do is so meaningful that it's more important than working with other people. In any company larger than a few people, your own individual work doesn't matter so much - your time is better spent helping other people get their shit done, especially if you know enough to have people be asking you Of course this doesn't get you promoted at FAANG or whatever but I don't really care much about that. It also doesn't account for annoying parasitic people who don't know how to communicate remotely or don't check documentation / internal KB before asking, but hopefully you hire better people than that :)
  • bdsa 3y ago
    I broadly agree with you (but then I work on cloud infrastructure which in most places I've worked so far has meant being a supporting/enabling function) but I do wonder: > In any company larger than a few people, your own individual work doesn't matter so much - your time is better spent helping other people get their shit done, especially if you know enough to have people be asking you This fairly obviously can't be true for everyone in an organisation so I wonder which factors affect it in practice - whether it's a function of personality or role, for example.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• spacebacon 3y ago
  Avoidant personality disorder is your friend. Mute the noise in your life or it may mute you. Break the chemical cycle of a classically conditioned digital mouse trap and create something truly useful but most importantly fun.
• rtpg 3y ago
  To be the annoying naysayer, but more as a thought experiment: many jobs benefit from increased focus. And like.. yeah, unnecessary notifications are unnecessary! Tautological. But in context: a coworker needs a piece of information. You are there. You have the information. Asking you saves them 30 minutes. Should they interrupt you? What if it's 5 minutes? What if it's 15? What is the level of urgency on their end? Is there pedagogical value in them figuring this out without you? Ultimately interruptions have varying degrees of necessity, and we should be evaluating a team's interruptions as a whole. "Turn off all notifications" might indeed be the proper baseline, but at the end of the day the real thing is team interaction. Is the problem interruptions? Or is it role distribution? Is it knowledge sharing? It's very easy in a context free situation to apply blanket statements but there's so much nuance to these interactions that I have a hard time establishing any sort of blanket rule. But at the end of the day, people's norms are different, so something needs to be said. "Don't talk to your coworkers" just rubs me the wrong way. It is definitely what is said to many teams who interact with programmers, though.
  • throwaway2037 3y ago
    When I started my career, I only had a phone and slow email. Then, email got faster. Eventually, I got chat. Things got so much faster with chat. Then, I got alerts for chats. Again: Faster because you never miss an alert. Then, chatbots appears to show alerts and help with simple things. Again: You go faster and get more information instantly. The places that delivered the most monetary value all had very high information velocity.
  • jillesvangurp 3y ago
    It's all about expectations. I'm a startup CTO. So, I'm constantly being pulled into meetings asked about this or that on Slack and there's always stuff piling up in my inbox. None of it requires a real time response from me. Most of those meetings are not that urgent/important. A lot of things on Slack resolve itself without me responding instantly. Me interrupting whatever it is I'm trying to do is super disruptive. A few tactical strikes on my calendar can remove any chance whatsoever to get anything significant done on a day. So me dropping everything I'm doing to respond to some random inbound thing is actually very expensive and disruptive. The way I deal with it is not responding immediately other than by accident. People stop expecting it when you stop doing that. They adapt. And they appreciate when you eventually do respond. Basically asynchronous communication makes responding more efficient. Instead of constantly attention hopping you simply periodically respond to stuff in order of priority. When urgent stuff really needs attention, people will find you. I turn off notifications/alerts for most things and I simply check when I have some time. Tools and apps begging for attention rank very low on my priority queue of things that need attention. Most email I still receive is actually notifications and not requests for lengthy replies. I rarely use email for discussions of any kind any more. Wrong medium for it. If my phone rings, it's generally a spam call. Most important calls are scheduled. And I prefer taking them on my laptop via a video call. If I don't recognize the number, I don't answer at all. All this eliminates interruptions of rare moments I have when I can actually focus on something. Focus time is actually blocked in my calendar and I don't allow stuff to creep into that other than by exception. And I strongly encourage people to not even attempt to book meetings with me outside a few dedicated slots I have for that. There's always more stuff to do than I can do. So, it's important to cherry pick and do it well.
• bandika 3y ago
  What works for me for a long time is total separation of work vs private online life. On my work laptop, no social media, private email etc is set up, whereas on my private laptop there is no access to any work related stuff. Also, no work email/chat on my phone. So no private notifications during working hours and if I really have to focus, I just turn off email/chat temporarily. On the other hand, after I finish work, zero work related notifications can reach me.
• alabhyajindal 3y ago
  Wow shocker
• thewileyone 3y ago
  Colleague sends an email. Ignore it cause I'm focused. Same colleague sends a chat request. Ignore it cause I'm focused. Same colleague sends a text message. Ignore it cause I'm focused. Same colleague actually calls. Ignore it cause I'm focused. Same colleague walks over to tell you about the email and the chat and the text and the call. But when he gets to your desk, he realizes that he figured out the solution, so breaks your focus to apologize for breaking your focus. Ass.
• jmcphers 3y ago
  The cookie popup that comes up and obscures the article before you can finish reading the title is deliciously ironic.
  • bborud 3y ago
    If you are lucky. There's the cookie popup, the newsletter popup, the popup that wants to talk about new features....and on and on. All while macOS gives you three popups for the same calendar event, a software update that it thinks you should know about right fucking now and a slew of popups from some application you started which now wants to disrupt your flow with.....more alerts. PS: if someone knows who wrote the calendar daemon in macOS, please say hello from me and ensure they know how pathetic I think it is that they managed to spend 70-80% CPU to update calendars. Really? Do them a favor and get them application forms in the "rapid food preparation" industry.
    • shortcake27 3y ago
      The Calendar app on my iPhone used 50mb of data in the last month. I have maybe 10 events in it. I can’t even begin to understand how it managed to pull 50mb. WhatsApp, which I use nonstop daily, pulled 3mb. Sure, on an unlimited cap 50mb is no problem. But when roaming it could cost a fortune. Seems like minimising resource usage is often an afterthought, even for Apple.
      • bborud 3y ago
        Hmm, it almost makes me suspicious that the calendar system is abused to move data it isn't supposed to move.
      • cbhl 3y ago
        IIRC the Calendar standards (iCal, etc) are pull-based, so your Calendar app has to poll/request the whole calendar constantly to check for new events in case you make one on another device (e.g. your computer). There are also enough edge cases that also nobody wants to change/improve on the standards. WhatsApp can send you a push when you get a message, so its usage is ~nothing if you're not sending and receiving messages.
• ivan888 3y ago
  So get rid of the stupid persistent red dot on review queues on Stack Overflow
  • sidewndr46 3y ago
    but someone has to contribute vast amounts of unpaid labor to make their investor's purchase profitable!
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  We need to get over ourselves with this "modern work" phrase. All work requires attention.
  • tester457 3y ago
    Modern work comes with modern distractions. All these emails and phone notifications ruin modern people from getting into flow states which require a lot of attention. I believe that people enter the flow state much less today than before smartphones came along.
  • trey-jones 3y ago
    My thoughts, exactly. Unfortunately, I think it's not simply that constant alerts steal attention, but also that dependence on computers is also training us to not pay attention. The computer will tell us the problem and how to solve it, no thought required, a lot of the time. Therefore, we need to be even more alert than we used to (have to be), in order to spot the rare occasion that the computer is wrong, and apply thought and common sense. Additionally (for me at least), controlling the quality of the computer tends to be less fulfilling and less exciting work than actually solving problems myself, meaning I don't care as much about it and am not as attentive to it.
  • mrwnmonm 3y ago
    Are you saying people thousands of years ago making cloth fabric by hand needed attention? Unbelievable.
    • marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Trying to build an Antikythera mechanism but I keep being handed wax tablets notifying me about 4 people liking the murals my friend made about his visit to Corinth last month, and now my politically weird uncle has apparently added me to a group celebrating the thirty tyrants of athens.
      • ok_dad 3y ago
        My father in law (deceased) used to spend 8-10 hours a day doing woodworking art for his business, then several hours delivering things to customers each day as well. I asked him how it tool 8-10 hours to do 3-6 pieces when I had been watching and he finished each one in about 30 minutes (other than paint drying and stuff). He said that people were always talking to him, because his store and work area were basically right in the middle of town and he worked out front rather than inside because he had no workshop in the store. I hung out with him for a day and saw no less than a dozen different people stop by and have 10-15 minute conversations with him, and he couldn't do much work during that time. That's a pretty useless story for HN, but seemed relevant to the topic at hand, and I like remembering my father in law and telling stories about him (I miss him considerably).
• fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I turned off all alerts except for messages from my family. I check everything else often enough and people really can’t tell the difference in my responsiveness. My overall happiness is higher now that things aren’t popping up or vibrating all the time.
  • _the_inflator 3y ago
    I side with you, same here. WhatsApp is pull only, so to say, no alerts at all. Other apps are restricted by iPhone. I am so glad there is no "Hacker News" app. ;)
    • geraldhh 3y ago
      i consider a website that presents structured text in a consumer-friendly way, using minimal resources, a very successful application of computers, the internet and a browser.
    • fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Dude I’m using HACK app right now :-)
    • collenjones 3y ago
      Octal
    • dabluecaboose 3y ago
      I installed a HN app from F-droid that was quite pleasant on a recent trip, when I had long stretches of time that I wanted to read something. Unfortunately, I could tell that I would spend a lot of time on it so I uninstalled it post-haste when the trip was over.
  • dheera 3y ago
    Same. - I block all unscheduled phone calls, whitelisting only parents/SO - I block all notifications and check apps pull-only - During work hours I check Slack about once every 30 minutes. (If there's some urgent deadline coming up I might check it a few more times in the evening but that's not the norm)
• dfxm12 3y ago
  Really, we should be asked if we want notifications in the first place. I find chat apps like Teams, Discord, alert way too much. The signal to noise is tiny. Maybe this is my fault (I never really "got" Discord, Slack, Teams etc. like I got email, IM, SharePoint and phone calls), but I get added to group chats/Teams without me knowing and just start getting visual, audio and haptic (on my phone) alerts with very little context. It's a bad UX. At least my phone makes it relatively easy to mute things, or everything. I wish there was a mute all notifications button on my keyboard like I have a mute mic and mute audio button. Aside from letting me focus, it would be really useful when presenting. Going through a few clicks through the notification center in Windows is a start, but it is too hidden to be obvious to anyone not specifically looking for it and is a bit cumbersome if you flip things on and off frequently.
  • manmal 3y ago
    I‘ve turned off push notifications for most productivity apps on my phone, and haven’t ever missed them. Slack and email have no business appearing on my home screen.
  • ok_dad 3y ago
    I just turn off my WiFi completely when I want to do work and need less distractions. One problem I have, though, is that toddlers have no "off" or "mute" button, so during non-school days it's kinda difficult to get more than one medium-sized (an hour or less time) thing done.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      > one medium-sized (an hour or less time) thing done Totally off-topic, but this fascinated me because it highlighted how differently people regard task size. If I have a task that can be done in about an hour or less, I call that "very small". A small task can be done in a day, a medium in a single-digit number of days. Just a thing that struck me as interesting.
      • ok_dad 3y ago
        To me, small tasks things that can be done almost immediately, medium are things I can do a half-dozen of per day, and large tasks take a whole day themselves. I don't think in more than 1-day increments, lately.
• biomcgary 3y ago
  Attention is all you need.
  • moffkalast 3y ago
    So goes for robots as does for humans.
  • meghan_rain 3y ago
    Underrated comment
• raydiatian 3y ago
  Solution: disable notifications. It turns out life is pretty great when you don’t know what’s happening in the news cycle. “But how will I hold relevant conversations with my friends and family?” If all you discuss with your community is current events, congratulations, you’re the perfect unit of manufactured consent.
  • OJFord 3y ago
    But I do want them if someone's asking for help I might be able to give, or frankly even if it's just something chatty/'bants' (that could change if there was more of it of course) - 'status updates' (shared as messages) though really wind me up. OK, have a nice lunch. OK, won't message you for a bit then - but I wasn't going to and this isn't a phone call or meeting so I wouldn't expect an immediate response anyway. If you're worried someone's going to try to reach you while you're out for half an hour and be upset that you don't reply sooner, just use the (Slack) built-in feature for that? I agree about news though - call me 'uninformed' if you want, but I think anyone who tries it quickly learns how little of it matters. (And I was a paying Times (London) subscriber before that, not like I was reading gossip mags, tabloids, and Sky News shock-horror clickbait.) Major stuff makes it to HN anyway.
• tj-teej 3y ago
  The comments and discourse here is always so black and white. If you're lucky enough to have creative work where you can deliver the most value by doing focused work all day, then by all means ignore your slack and email. BTW I'm very jealous of your job! Why can't we just be adult professionals who can decide for themselves when to spend time without distractions and when not to? Surely we need both right?
  • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    The problem isn't when you have a software dev, say, doing focused work, and their manager, say, being interrupt-driven. That's fine (though the majority of us here on HN are "focused work" types, so their viewpoint tends to predominate). The problem comes when the manager (or IT or someone else) decides that everyone else has to be available for instant response to the alerts. That violates your "adult professionals" rule, too.
    • calvinmorrison 3y ago
      Except I used to be able to walk over to your desk if I needed to talk asap or ring your work internal radio. Now I send an email a slack a call and get a response two days later
• sigstoat 3y ago
  i worked with this guy who had alerts popping up on his screen for everything that was anywhere in his calendar (somebody else having a meeting in room X? he got an alert when it started), every email that arrived for him, and probably some other stuff, too. while you were talking to him, his head would twitch over to the monitor every time one came in, yet he never knew what email he'd received. i don't think i've ever met anyone who had a higher defect rate in their code.
• headcanon 3y ago
  This is a big part of why I don't use social media beyond HN and Reddit (if those count). Being inundated with a constant stream of notifications is not only distracting, it makes me feel less in control of my mind, and therefore, my life. My regular email, slack notifications from work, and text messages from friends are pretty much all my introverted mind can handle, and even then I still feel out of focus much of the time. Meditating helps considerably, but it feels like I'm swimming upstream. While I'm not immune to wanting to pull the content slot machine, at least with HN and Reddit I get at least some choice about how I interact with those environments.
  • whartung 3y ago
    It doesn’t help that all of the documentation you need is in the same system as all of the distractions, especially since much of modern documentation is folklore projected out through blogs and sites like SO or Reddit. Back in the day documentation was the book on your desk and that pretty much was the end of it. At worst you may have had a stack of monthly magazines that could only hold your interest for so long. If anything during idle time you might have been reading the dustier and darker corners of your system documentation and find a surprise you could use.
  • nicbou 3y ago
    I've aggressively silenced technology over the last few years and wrote about it. I just turn off anything that calls for my attention without justification. https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/silence https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/silence It's hard to notice the improvement, a bit like a headache that slowly subsides. But it works. I don't get sidetracked as much. Technology feels less... noisy.
  • foobar_______ 3y ago
    I feel like I could have written this comment verbatim. Glad I'm not alone in the world. Thanks for sharing.
  • qingcharles 3y ago
    HN is a killer for my productivity, even though I only try to visit it a couple of times a day. Once in the morning to read the whole front page, and then later in the day to get updates. I need to somehow massively increase my filtering of which articles I open. I often end up reading 50% of the stories on the front page, plus the comments.
• lr4444lr 3y ago
  No mention of Cal Newport? I'm torn on this. Yeah, it'd be great to have a hard line between dev and ops with both groups also having managers to shield them from the business team that protects the mental states of flow of each. But realistically, IME, devs who respond to the ops issues on the features they build directly from the biz people are way more valuable to the bottom line of the company in terms of getting high value work done. Yeah, it's not optimal, but throughput per dev on the aggregate and a deep understanding of the tech vis a vis the actual business needs its serving is really important.
• zwieback 3y ago
  Related question: are there some employees that are so motivated to solve the problem in front of them (or simply more disciplined) less likely to get distracted? If so, what has been the relative productivity hit to "diligent" vs. "slacking" employees?
• chatmasta 3y ago
  I have "Do Not Disturb" enabled 100% of the time, except when I'm waiting for a delivery. Incoming calls from unknown numbers are also automatically silenced.
• brianjking 3y ago
  I'm starting to try to switch my phone to greyscale during the day.
• JohnFen 3y ago
  This is why I've completely disabled all notifications in Windows. Those "toasts" are a distraction I can't ignore since they forcibly impose themselves over whatever I'm focusing on. Better that they never happen. Nothing in the operating system is so important that it needs a toast.
• lemonberry 3y ago
  And not just work. Not that it isn't important, but in addition to work (my own business) I'm a caregiver for my father. I have very little free or down time. If I don't minimize or cut out alerts I cannot make good use of that time. Alerts add to my cognitive overload and stress. The tighter I lock down my alerts (and inputs) the less stressed I am.
• dmart 3y ago
  I'm jealous of technology workers from about 10 years ago, before work IM tools like Slack, HipChat, and Teams became the standard. Being able to work uninterruptedly except for emails (for which a delayed response was acceptable) sounds like an absolute dream. I dread the constant feeling of low-level anxiety induced by these tools (Gotta keep that status icon green! Gotta respond to messages right away!)
  • thewebcount 3y ago
    I remember being at a small company in the late 90s. We hired a new engineer and he used AIM. The boss was furious that the new guy was spending his time on the clock chatting with friends (and possibly leaking company secrets to people at other companies!). They forbid him to use it, so he would log into it every morning and set his status to some childish message about how his employer wouldn’t allow him to use it during business hours. I remember thinking it was odd that the engineer would think it was OK to be chatting with friends while he was supposed to be working, but I also thought it was odd that the boss was so pissed off about it. It’s not like we didn’t (physically, IRL) chat among ourselves about non-work stuff, too. As long as we were getting our work done, who cares? Now everyone has chat and social media on every device, include their own that they bring with them anywhere, including work. I also remember that when I was a kid, I was never supposed to interrupt my father at work by calling him, unless it was an absolute real emergency, like the house burning down. Times have changed!
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Trigg3r 3y ago
    It was just email based instead (still is, somewhat?), plenty of distractions, how great would it be to just code (tm)?
  • rzzzt 3y ago
    Do you have no IRC, ICQ, AIM or Skype in your past?
    • 3y ago
• Eduard 3y ago
  > In tough economic times, everyone looks for ways to lower costs without impacting productivity Has it ever been any different?
• dahwolf 3y ago
  The real problem is complexity, which has gone exponential. When I joined the work force in 2000, my life was comparably so stunningly simple. Just a few guys in the same room. Barely any process or documentation. Email was still new so the concept of an outside world barely existed. Chat did not exist, but wouldn't make sense anyway. We talked a bit here and there but 80% was actually doing the work, not talking about it. Management had no idea what we were doing and metric porn did not yet exist. A lot has changed. More complicated tech stacks means more deeper specializations, requiring more handovers. A lot is outsourced now so you may need vendors to move things. You may have off-shored things. Nobody has clarity on what you need to do, hence you need to hop the organization to find out the details. You need to pass legal and the privacy office. You need to report status constantly to an army of bean counters. Testing has become amazingly complicated and so is system administration. It requires super human effort to move things by an inch. So no, "collaboration is not a force multiplier". Collaboration isn't a product or outcome. Ideally you'd have an absolute minimum of it. The ideal workflow is that you create a clear and detailed work package, hand it over to the worker, whom you then leave alone to actually do it. Your companies' purpose is to ship software or whatever else it does, it isn't to ship emails, chat, status updates, approvals and documents. It is absolutely baffling to me how highly paid office workers' productivity is pissed away like this without intervention. Don't send them to a yoga class to cope, fix the fucking problem. You're setting your money on fire.
  • ulfw 3y ago
    Not sure what your work place back then was but we clearly had tons of emails sent in 2000 already. As to chat ICQ came out in 1996, as did AOL IM in 1997, Yahoo and MSN as well. They were very popular by 2000.
    • pocketarc 3y ago
      This might also be country-specific. I didn’t even have internet at that point, let alone chat.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
• Willish42 3y ago
  I fully support the sentiment here, and took a lot of the content from Deep Work to heart when I first read it and was trying to figure out how to be a more productive professional SWE, but a lot of this information is common knowledge within SWE culture for those who care about it, and I still haven't found an organization or team that actually puts these into practice. I fear we've already lost this battle and the non-knowledge-worker to knowledge-worker ratio has gotten too high for tech companies/workers to get the cat back in the bag. If anybody has successfully changed a dev team's processes to make changes in the right direction, I'd love to hear how that happened for you. Many people I work with complain about too many meetings and interruptions and yet the expectations which contribute to these problems continue. My org recently adopted having a "no meeting day" every week and without this I don't think I'd ever get anything done.
  • esafak 3y ago
    It just takes an executive who cares. Look at Shopify: https://www.yahoo.com/now/shopify-axing-meetings-involving-more-171802803.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/shopify-axing-meetings-involving-m...
• charlie0 3y ago
  The solution appears to be rather simple here. Just establish "office hours" and put them in the calendar or something. These are times when you will be available to answer any questions. Otherwise, unless a true emergency comes up, it's focus time.
• deepzn 3y ago
  "Attention is all you need"
• mindvirus 3y ago
  What are some alternatives to the constantly noisy slack for startups? I like the idea of low effort messages, but other than being extremely self disciplined there doesn't seem to be a great way to consume them in a reasonable, low interrupt way.
• hboon 3y ago
  I always remind myself that Instagram was a 2-person team for a very long time (compared to time to PMF and acquisition).
• 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  The only major difference between work now and work 15 years ago is there's more remote work, and nobody has been taught how to work remote. There are multiple books, blogs and guides on it, but nobody reads anything anymore, so here's the tl;dr: - Schedule all your work. Schedule when you'll check e-mails, slack, teams. Schedule when you'll have office hours. Schedule when you'll do research. Schedule when you'll pair with someone. Schedule lunch. Your calendar should be booked pretty much every hour of the day, except for meeting day, when you keep a 3-hour window open for meetings. - Silence all notifications except meeting reminders. Provide an escalation path for use in emergencies. Make e-mail rules, slack rules, etc that will bypass a snoozed notification and go right to you. Put your phone number in your Slack, Teams, Outlook, etc profile. - When you do have meetings, be strategic. Schedule meetings only when you have already done the work to prepare for them, have an agenda, have done research, and need consensus or troubleshooting. Choose shorter meeting windows, like 15 minutes, 25 minutes, 45 minutes. Have someone keep a timer to remind people before the meeting comes to a close and end it on time. Don't schedule a meeting to find out if you need a meeting. Don't end the meeting without action items and meeting notes. Don't schedule a meeting when an e-mail back-and-forth will do. - Prioritize working asynchronously. Push back on meetings and calls, and instead ask for details in e-mail, Slack, Jira, Confluence, GitHub Issues/PRs, etc. - Actually learn how to use your ticketing and wiki system. Don't make it someone else's job to organize your own work. Use the systems to make your work more efficient. Put notes in as you do work, and direct people to go look for your current progress there rather than bug you. Be habitual about keeping status, progress, etc consistently up-to-date. If someone asks for status, point them at a URL to your status updates. If this seems arduous, there are almost always existing tools designed to make it easier. - Document and publicize your workflow. What your schedule is, how you organize it, how to contact you and under what circumstances. Make sure anyone in your company can find out whether they need to contact you and when and how. - Try hard not to multitask. If you aren't getting several tickets done per week, your work hasn't been broken up sufficiently, or you're jumping around too much. - Keep track of your time and work so that you can account for it. Measure toil vs feature work. If the toil goes over 50%, tell your boss, and keep a record of it. After a month of that you should be able to estimate your lost time, extrapolate it out to a year, and show them how much time/money they're losing. If your boss doesn't care, have a skip-level. If you think any of that is crazy, just remember some of us have been doing Open Source development for 20+ years without meetings. If IRC, pull requests, and mailing lists are good enough to create the foundations of most of the world's software, it's probably good enough for your job.