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I think this is why I love incident response. "In an emergency, that whole tangle of self-absorption lifts, because "what needs to be done" is usually so obvio

I think this is why I love incident response. "In an emergency, that whole tangle of self-absorption lifts, because "what needs to be done" is usually so obvious that nobody, not even my inner critic, could reasonably disagree. For a certain kind of person – and I'm definitely one of them – this total absence of ambivalence feels freeing, even disconcertingly elating, never mind the fact that what's unfolding around me is unquestionably bad."

gumby 3y ago
I think this is the reason deadlines work so well for some people: the need to finish task X before tomorrow autodeprioritizes everything else.
- tommilukkarinen 3y ago
  Lovely insight.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  That works nicely until your brain figures it out and it stops working - instead of "autodeprioritizing everything else", it just cranks up the fear of impending failure to the point nothing has any priority because you can barely think straight... For me, this switch happened somewhere between my last year at university and my second job. As a part of it, I lost the ability to "pull off all-nighters" - not in the sense of being able to stay awake that long, but in the sense of being able to do anything useful in that time.
  - mckirk 3y ago
    I can definitely relate to that. I don't think it's necessarily an effect of your brain 'figuring out the trick', but more an issue of a part of your 'identity' getting shifted in an unhelpful direction. When I was younger, I was absolutely sure that I'd pull off whatever was required of me, even if that meant doing everything under a ton of pressure. But at some point, the circumstances just didn't allow that anymore... And after the first time that this paradigm didn't work out anymore, I didn't have this reassuring surety anymore either, which was a big part of why it always did work out before I think. So now I just tell people to be careful with their personal 'axioms', and to not stress them to a breaking point.
    - wholinator2 3y ago
      I can also relate that pulling off all nighters at school tended to be at least a little rewarding. Either i was learning something interesting or building something cool but the similar calibre problems at work don't have the same allure. If I'm doing the same at work it either means work was incorrectly planned and now I'm expected to fix that, or someone else broke something unnecessarily and now I'm expected to fix that. It's just an entirely negative context to extra work now. I'm not really learning anything, I'm not getting paid more, I'm not getting a cool project out of it. It's just an accidentally (sometimes) manufactured catastrophe that someone with more money or power has declared is my fault or responsibility. I definitely do much better in academia
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I work in consulting and I refuse to do “staff augmentation” type work where there is a predefined bucket of money and no goals or deadlines at the beginning. I also jump on projects where there is a short deadline and reasonable scope. It forces focus. I also try to jump on any project during pregnancy-sales so I can help shape the scope and deadlines.
abbadadda 3y ago
Unfortunately, incident response was the first thing that I thought of also. You might be an SRE if? :-)
ilyt 3y ago
I like it because it cuts bikeshedding and people meandering endlessly on possible ideal solution
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  I like it because it provides a socially acceptable excuse to tell other people to GTFO and let me focus. Otherwise, I tend to be distracted by requests from other people. Often imagined ones. It's really probably just me who needs to convince myself that yes, I can say "no", and yes, I can stop thinking about every other obligation and expectation while focusing on the task at hand. A crisis temporarily eliminates this entire problem.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    We just nominate a central person for contact during emergency and they have to deal with the communication, then rest just updates the status of the outage to that person.
agumonkey 3y ago
I tend to feel better in semi critical situations due to that. Less friction, higher focus. Some people are even addicted to these because it feels like a healthier deeper challenge. ps: and in an extrapolated variant, i remember reading an article about vietnam us army vet saying they can't live in society anymore because was has near zero ambivalence and they prefer it.
irthomasthomas 3y ago
Yeah I was nodding along with that, and the whole article, really. Explains why I volunteered for first aider. However, I'm not sure if his one neat trick of mono-tasking is enough to overcome my own particular version of this malody. Just now, after reading this, I thought, why don't I try this monotasking thing right now. And my first task will be to rearrange my KDE desktop to support this more linear mode. Instead of having multiple projects spread out across many desktops and activities, I might go back to one desktop with two windows. I can have the main project IDE open on the left and use tdrop to turn all other apps into dropdowns that shuffle in and out, one at a time, on the right side. I'd press a button and the terminal would be replaced by web browser. Press another and the browser is replaced by the file manager, and so on. Now, wouldn't it be great if the file manager, when it drops down, defaulted to the current project directory, instead of always the same home directory? Yeah! So, I'll need to probably set up an Activity per Project and name it as the project. Then I can run a script on activity change that sets the file managers default directory to the project. Then again, I think, I already have access to the files through the IDE, and home much of my file manager time do I really spend in the project dir, Vs my Documents, Apps, Downloads, Scripts, Books and Media dirs? I guess I should set up a hotkey for each of my main destinations, then I can go to any of those destinations with one command, and reduce the opportunities for distraction. But, which hotkey system to use, the one built in to KDE Plasma? Or, the one in my Stream Deck, or xdotool, or sxhkd, or even break out the big guns with autokey? Any idea I have leads to a combinatorial explosion of new ideas. And one of those new ideas eventually and inevitably feels a hundred times more important and more urgent than the original idea that spawned it. So, when I try this monotasking, I think it may work for a while, but without fail it will break down when I'm in the middle of a mono-task and suddenly become convinced that the new idea I have will actually make this current task irrelevant, or so much easier to complete using the new tool I just invented in my head, that it would feel crazy NOT to abandon this task and switch to the new one.
leokennis 3y ago
Also, in a prio 1 incident, suddenly everyone is there to help you. The most unity I ever feel amongst colleagues is when we’re in a war room and stuff is broken left and right. And once service is resumed, the immense shared feeling of relief and accomplishment.

gumby 3y ago

I think this is the reason deadlines work so well for some people: the need to finish task X before tomorrow autodeprioritizes everything else.

tommilukkarinen 3y ago
Lovely insight.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
That works nicely until your brain figures it out and it stops working - instead of "autodeprioritizing everything else", it just cranks up the fear of impending failure to the point nothing has any priority because you can barely think straight... For me, this switch happened somewhere between my last year at university and my second job. As a part of it, I lost the ability to "pull off all-nighters" - not in the sense of being able to stay awake that long, but in the sense of being able to do anything useful in that time.
- mckirk 3y ago
  I can definitely relate to that. I don't think it's necessarily an effect of your brain 'figuring out the trick', but more an issue of a part of your 'identity' getting shifted in an unhelpful direction. When I was younger, I was absolutely sure that I'd pull off whatever was required of me, even if that meant doing everything under a ton of pressure. But at some point, the circumstances just didn't allow that anymore... And after the first time that this paradigm didn't work out anymore, I didn't have this reassuring surety anymore either, which was a big part of why it always did work out before I think. So now I just tell people to be careful with their personal 'axioms', and to not stress them to a breaking point.
  - wholinator2 3y ago
    I can also relate that pulling off all nighters at school tended to be at least a little rewarding. Either i was learning something interesting or building something cool but the similar calibre problems at work don't have the same allure. If I'm doing the same at work it either means work was incorrectly planned and now I'm expected to fix that, or someone else broke something unnecessarily and now I'm expected to fix that. It's just an entirely negative context to extra work now. I'm not really learning anything, I'm not getting paid more, I'm not getting a cool project out of it. It's just an accidentally (sometimes) manufactured catastrophe that someone with more money or power has declared is my fault or responsibility. I definitely do much better in academia
scarface_74 3y ago
I work in consulting and I refuse to do “staff augmentation” type work where there is a predefined bucket of money and no goals or deadlines at the beginning. I also jump on projects where there is a short deadline and reasonable scope. It forces focus. I also try to jump on any project during pregnancy-sales so I can help shape the scope and deadlines.

abbadadda 3y ago

Unfortunately, incident response was the first thing that I thought of also. You might be an SRE if? :-)

ilyt 3y ago

I like it because it cuts bikeshedding and people meandering endlessly on possible ideal solution

TeMPOraL 3y ago
I like it because it provides a socially acceptable excuse to tell other people to GTFO and let me focus. Otherwise, I tend to be distracted by requests from other people. Often imagined ones. It's really probably just me who needs to convince myself that yes, I can say "no", and yes, I can stop thinking about every other obligation and expectation while focusing on the task at hand. A crisis temporarily eliminates this entire problem.
- ilyt 3y ago
  We just nominate a central person for contact during emergency and they have to deal with the communication, then rest just updates the status of the outage to that person.

agumonkey 3y ago

I tend to feel better in semi critical situations due to that. Less friction, higher focus. Some people are even addicted to these because it feels like a healthier deeper challenge. ps: and in an extrapolated variant, i remember reading an article about vietnam us army vet saying they can't live in society anymore because was has near zero ambivalence and they prefer it.

irthomasthomas 3y ago

Yeah I was nodding along with that, and the whole article, really. Explains why I volunteered for first aider. However, I'm not sure if his one neat trick of mono-tasking is enough to overcome my own particular version of this malody. Just now, after reading this, I thought, why don't I try this monotasking thing right now. And my first task will be to rearrange my KDE desktop to support this more linear mode. Instead of having multiple projects spread out across many desktops and activities, I might go back to one desktop with two windows. I can have the main project IDE open on the left and use tdrop to turn all other apps into dropdowns that shuffle in and out, one at a time, on the right side. I'd press a button and the terminal would be replaced by web browser. Press another and the browser is replaced by the file manager, and so on. Now, wouldn't it be great if the file manager, when it drops down, defaulted to the current project directory, instead of always the same home directory? Yeah! So, I'll need to probably set up an Activity per Project and name it as the project. Then I can run a script on activity change that sets the file managers default directory to the project. Then again, I think, I already have access to the files through the IDE, and home much of my file manager time do I really spend in the project dir, Vs my Documents, Apps, Downloads, Scripts, Books and Media dirs? I guess I should set up a hotkey for each of my main destinations, then I can go to any of those destinations with one command, and reduce the opportunities for distraction. But, which hotkey system to use, the one built in to KDE Plasma? Or, the one in my Stream Deck, or xdotool, or sxhkd, or even break out the big guns with autokey? Any idea I have leads to a combinatorial explosion of new ideas. And one of those new ideas eventually and inevitably feels a hundred times more important and more urgent than the original idea that spawned it. So, when I try this monotasking, I think it may work for a while, but without fail it will break down when I'm in the middle of a mono-task and suddenly become convinced that the new idea I have will actually make this current task irrelevant, or so much easier to complete using the new tool I just invented in my head, that it would feel crazy NOT to abandon this task and switch to the new one.

leokennis 3y ago

Also, in a prio 1 incident, suddenly everyone is there to help you. The most unity I ever feel amongst colleagues is when we’re in a war room and stuff is broken left and right. And once service is resumed, the immense shared feeling of relief and accomplishment.