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I'm not sure how I feel about this. One of the biggest problems I had with working in an office was precisely how easy it was for people to bother me for just a
by jspiros 14y ago
I'm not sure how I feel about this. One of the biggest problems I had with working in an office was precisely how easy it was for people to bother me for just a quick question, killing my flow. I much prefer having passive indicators and queries, as you get with IM (which you can ignore until you're ready) and a bug tracker (which also forces people to keep their process rigorous and documented, as they have to work through these systems to communicate at all; too easy to let bug trackers and the like get out of sync with reality if people are just quickly verbally telling people about problems).
I can see how this would work well for people who work on many short tasks, though, as opposed to work like mine that often benefits from focusing for hours at a time with no interruptions.
- henrik_w 14y agoAfter the first passive indicator (mail, IM, issue tracker), I much prefer phone/face to face over written communication - faster and higher bandwidth. As for interruptions - if somebody else is stuck, and a quick answer from you will let them continue, then you'll be less productive, but the overall productivity may be higher. I wrote more about it here: http://henrikwarne.com/2013/04/02/programmer-productivity-interruptions-meetings-and-working-remotely/ http://henrikwarne.com/2013/04/02/programmer-productivity-in...
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoYou can lock your door, mark yourself as unavailable, but still get notifications of P2P chat (kind of like "you have a text") so you can decide what to ignore. In my product, Sococo Teamspace. If I sound like a broken record, its because we've been around for 5 years and I still keep seeing announcements of products with a fraction of our features and they get a lot of press. WE Definitely need to work on our marketing I guess.