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Some days an interruption will throw me off my train of thought, and I spend the remaining six hours collecting discarded bottles and railway ties for hopeful u
by Waterluvian 1y ago
Some days an interruption will throw me off my train of thought, and I spend the remaining six hours collecting discarded bottles and railway ties for hopeful use somewhere, somehow, sometime.
Other days an interruption costs me pretty much nothing.
I’m still trying to figure out how to tell which of those days I’m going to have and whether to just not log into Slack for the day.
- thecoppinger 1y agoRight there with you :)
- pinoy420 1y ago[dead]
- nashashmi 1y agoSo the average is 23 min 15 sec right?
- Waterluvian 1y agoAhahaha… I mean… gosh, quite possibly?
- bubblebeard 1y agoMy feelings exactly. Whenever I get one of those days I’ve found I get more done away from my desk. Taking a walk in the forest or doing some household chores can really help you get back on track. Of course at times it’s just better to admit altogether this isn’t a day meant for work and spend it relaxing instead. Usually, the benefit of that is a really productive day at work the day after too, everybody wins.
- Waterluvian 1y agoAlmost all my employers and managers have been very understanding about this. But one of my favourites was a manager earlier in my career who picked up that I was anxious about my work hours and ethic. To paraphrase, he said, “the company isn’t paying you to solve problems M-F 9-5. It’s paying you for when you solve them in the shower or on a walk or when you’re putting your kid to bed, and then come into work and implement the solution.” I’ve thought about this for years as I tune my work life balance. I’ve never felt like I’m wrongly bringing work home with me that way. It’s always felt like an incredible optimization where my job gives me these puzzles I get to carry with me and work on when I’m bored or my ADHD addled brain screams for stimulation.
- junon 1y agoYou've been very lucky. I wish I had a similar experience. Managers who truly think that way are beautiful creatures.
- pockybum522 1y agoDo you happen to know if that one is hiring for anything at the moment? Left to solve problems at that pace, I'm pretty sure I could do some great things for them.
- saagarjha 1y agoMost remote work gigs are basically this.
- pastage 1y agoThere are absolutely places where you are chained to the computer in remote positions this is a culture thing not how work is done. We have a nice culture and we are hiring, sadly not remote anymore. I do not think it actually affects productivity in either way. What happens is that people seem to feel better.
- bongodongobob 1y agoI've never worked anywhere where I wouldn't be laughed at for suggesting this. "No, we do pay you to work from 9-5, M-F." You are very lucky.
- kaffekaka 1y agoAs long as I compulsively think about work in the shower, at 3AM in bed or while out running, I will never feel guilty about thinking about anything else than work for a while during 9-5.
- apercu 1y ago100%!and also why I have been self employed for 11+ years.
- dylan604 1y agoThis is one of the very best things to me about work from home. There are times I just get up and go piddle in the garden, take a short bike ride, or even just run an errand. I even do it when I'm stuck rather than just from being interrupted. It helps the brain to essentially, ctrl-z; bg and then move on to the next thing. When I return, I find the job %1 has completed, and I have a new approach/idea that is typically much more successful than the previous attempt of banging my head on the desk/keyboard in frustration. It's much healthier for me than vibe coding around the problem
- jakeydus 1y agoSorry my grandmother used to use the word piddle to mean pee so I got a real crack out of this.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoI read it the same way and assumed they were piddling in the garden to add nitrogen to their compost.
- jaredhallen 1y agoIn my experience, to piddle around is to fool about, while to simply piddle is, indeed, to potty. So based on that, I see where you're coming from.
- dylan604 1y agoI absolutely meant piddle about, but I guess that key word got left out.
- jaredhallen 1y agoIn my experience, to piddle around is to fool about, while to simply piddle is, indeed, to potty. So based on that, I see where you're coming from.
- bubblebeard 1y agoYeah, most of my best work comes while I’m out for a run on a local forest track. I try not to think about work while I’m out there, probably that’s why it’s so helpful.
- linhns 1y agoSame here. I often work more on the productive day if possible to maximise the roll I’m on
- karmakaze 1y agoI've found one thing that minimizes interruption cost: pair programming. At one startup we pair programmed all day, every day. Resuming from an interruption was almost seamless. Can't explain it, only experienced it.
- SoftTalker 1y agoIf only I wouldn’t prefer stabbing myself in the leg with a rusty knife over pair programming.
- dylan604 1y agoI've never done official pair programming, but I get frustrated when I'm not on the keyboard as I find others think slower.
- glxxyz 1y ago"no the other one, down a bit, no the one above, no go back..."
- airtonix 1y agoup up up up ... you went too far....
- Dilettante_ 1y agoThis is why you need to learn vim commands /hj
- mrbombastic 1y agoCalling out explicit line numbers and zoom annotation tools help with this
- kmoser 1y agoHave you tried plugging in a second keyboard and taking over where necessary? I do a lot of remote work in which my colleague and I work on the same computer and it's quite useful for either of us to jump in with our own keyboard (and mouse). It does take a bit of occasional verbal negotiation to agree on who really knows what to do (and can do it fastest) but if you communicate well then it's pretty easy.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- neves 1y agoAs I get older, I feel I take more time to get back on track. I don't feel less intelligent, maybe more experience compensates for it. I probably make less wrong turns. But I have to be more rigid to prevent interruptions.
- heisenbit 1y agoI try to compensate with more and larger screens. Also resorting to writing down key aspects of context and plan. Used to keep it in my head but context switches can derail me more easily now so I need a way to get back again.
- baxtr 1y agoFor me, the difference is whether I had pre-planned my tasks or not. Knowing what I wanted to focus on and achieve from 10-11 am makes it much easier to get back on track. In contrast, when I simply begin working on something, I end up elsewhere easily, even without external interruptions.
- astrobe_ 1y agoFor me, it is more about the nature of the interruption. An easy question that only requires pulling something from memory doesn't cost much. A question that requires some thinking has a huge cost, even more so when you have to check the code or documentation. Sometimes even reading an email/teams notification can throw me off. It's not about the interaction (someone coming to your desk, a call,...), it's about the topic. However I think that in both cases, if the interruption happens while coding, the risk of bug is about the same.
- Dilettante_ 1y ago>A question that requires some thinking has a huge cost [...] It's not about the interaction [...], it's about the topic. For me personally, every interaction with another person requires booting up "Human Mode™", which invariably pushes out any concentration I had on the task-at-hand.
- deepsun 1y agoI noticed it positively correlates with the amount of sleep I got the night before, and negatively with the amount of coffee I drank the week before.
- nicbou 1y agoIt could be that some tasks require you to hold a lot of context in your head. Interruptions clear that context and it must be rebuilt. Or you could be tired. It’s crazy how ineffective one gets with a little less sleep.
- vorgol 1y agoFor me it's a combination of the nature of task, where I'm at and the nature and duration of the interruption. But usually an interruption causes a large amount of penalty points.
- tomrod 1y agoI find a bit of meditation before work and good coffee reliably put me in the latter state, maybe 19 times out of 20.
- el_benhameen 1y agoAny advice on getting started with meditation? Particularly for someone with a busy mind.
- tomrod 1y agoI'm not studied in any particular tradition. I typically take a few minutes to connect with exactly what my body is feeling. The socks on my feet, the cinch of a belt, the wind blowing my hair, the cool or hot of HVAC on my palms and knuckles, the minor ache or pain, and so on. I typically start from my feet and go to top of my head, then back down to my nose. It typically takes me about 10 minutes. Then, I ponder what I remember of my coffee, breakfast, dinner the night before, how I felt when I woke up. Then I imagine how I want to change things. I do this 2-5 minutes. At that point, I plan my day. It works for me. I know there are a ton of different ways to do it, but for me it's simply a time for reconnecting to my internal and external self. Because its the same format with new content (what I feel now, what happened most recently) it feels more like a common exercise routine than a hard thing. But it took a few weeks of frustrating effort to learn to keep focus.
- el_benhameen 1y agoThanks, I like this a lot
- TomLisankie 1y agoDo you think it's related to the level of emotion tied with the interruption? For example, finding out a friend or relative was in a bad accident is surely gonna be more distracting than someone asking if they can borrow a pen for a few minutes.