As a "semi-retired old dude," I have been absolutely reveling in the productivity I have achieved, working at home. It's been awesome.
It isn't just because I'm working at home. I suspect that a lot of it is because I'm working alone.
I was a manager for a long time, and quickly realized that "team overhead" was the true enemy of productivity. This includes things like Slack convos, and water-cooler chats.
It's a long topic, but all sorts of things are required to enable a good team integration; especially if we need to have a bunch of less-experienced team members on board. I was fortunate to lead a team of very experienced engineers. We shared a vocabulary and a common vision, so a great deal of "basic" overhead was avoided.
The (big) downside of working alone, is that I need to keep the scope of my projects reasonable. I can get a lot more done than most lone developers, but it's still a great deal less than what can be accomplished by a tight team.
As long as we have teams, we'll have overhead challenges.
>I was a manager for a long time, and quickly realized that "team overhead" was the true enemy of productivity. This includes things like Slack convos, and water-cooler chats.
An enemy to the productivity that you observed and measured. If you removed these Slack convos and water-cooler chats then you may find an increase in the productivity you measured but a drop in the actual value provided.
Why am I saying that is the case? Because, water cooler-chats and Slack conversations have an effect of disseminating information throughout an organization. Someone in team A may realize that they're working on a problem similar to a person in team B. While this may not be an issue in smaller companies as a company grows it becomes more and more common that team silos start to arise. Overlap in work to be completed also becomes more common as the "start-up solve it ourselves" mentality is applied by each team instead of organizationally.
Second, if you don't have a rapport with your co-workers (fostered through Slack conversations and water-cooler chats) then you're going to have a harder time communicating with them. Why? Because everyone communicates in different ways. Being able to understand a persons communication style and emotional state comes through understanding the person. The article calls this out, "I love collaboration, whiteboard sessions, small brainstorms, midday team coffees, and happy hour drinks. These things build community, make the work better, and are defintely needed. "
Exactly. If anyone was a fan of the old BOFH articles, they may remember that Simon's aim was to make the network as efficient as possible, by eliminating the biggest inefficiencies; namely, the users.
I just think that folks conceive of remote work as some kind of "overhead-free" panacea.
I think it is well accepted that the larger the team/company, the greater the inefficiency, and one person is the most efficient is all. But that it's only productivity per person, not the total amount produced. At the end of the day, some products (be they software, cars, or whatever) are complex enough that you need more than one person working on it. Even if that means moving from a signs person to a team of (say) four when your only wanted to double the amount of work done.
Still, I can see why returning to working on one-person projects where you get loads done would be really satisfying.
>But that it's only productivity per person, not the total amount produced.
I'm not sure that's true because of differing expertise, bouncing ideas off someone, and help in getting unstuck. I'm guessing productivity peaks in a team of 3-5.
No, because some projects are big enough where they can't be done by a 3 person team. If Google takes 100,000 developer hours to write, it would take a 3 person team 15+ years to create. But you can't take 50 developers working 2,000 hours and get it done in a year. You need something like 100 developers because they are half as efficient when working in that big of a group.
> I was fortunate to lead a team of very experienced engineers.
Too bad you were more worried about your own productivity than paying it forward and mentoring less experienced engineers. God forbid you would have had that misfortune.
Focus is woefully undervalued, I think. I haven't had a single job as a software engineer that didn't have a constant background of distractions and interruption that prevented work from getting done. My current job is great, but its biggest issue is the sheer amount of interruption and poor organization of information that makes it difficult to get work done in a timely way. When I have to switch contexts frequently, for lack of a less cliche term, it takes even more time for me to get back up to speed with where I'd left off. Some people are clearly better at this than others, but I'd bet that those who can handle context switching well would still do even better under a system that valued focus. I don't think this really has much to do with introversion(which everyone has a different definition of and, in my experience, everyone claims they are, making the term worthless IMO).
This last weekend I did something that I normally refuse to do, which was to catch up on work. I still dedicated most of my time towards non-work, yet being able to work without interruption was not only a breath of fresh air but seemed to allow me to get more done in the same amount of time.
My guess as to why organizations don't care about focus is that they value the perception of "getting things done"; when engineers that need focus are frequently interrupted by the process, they'll shift to getting smaller tasks done first so that management will know that they're working on something. Organizations will tend to tolerate a more complex task taking longer than estimated, but in my experience are less tolerant of engineers not pushing lines of code for days because they're taking time to implement said complex task in a good way. In essence, it's a spin on "butts in seats", except it creates the illusion of productivity when in reality it could mean counter-productivity.
I'm not exactly sure that having the process wall people off from interrupting each other is necessarily a good thing. What would be better is a good planning process that limits unnecessary change combined with a working culture that values focus.
EDIT: I'm not talking about legitimate interruptions like when someone needs help or wants to pair program. I'm talking about interruptions that are either environment related or are a result of process failure(e.g. new tasks and course corrections frequently added to the pile because of poor planning). Although I can imagine some would want to limit "good interruptions" to a window, if possible.
My experience based on a not short career in several industries is that the worst focus killer is a manager who only knows how to put numbers in a spreadsheet. Those numbers have to come from somewhere and that is almost always from bugging their direct reports. These managers feel the need (and some of that is also pressure from their managers doing the same thing) to have a finger on the pulse of what's going on as they claim, but what is really happening is they feel that they have to show how hard they're working. So, they're constantly asking (basically), "is it done yet?".
They best managers I have had are stealthy. They'll monitor from afar mostly (while getting their work done). They get updates during appropriate times. They respect their direct reports and understand that one can't get anything done with constant interruptions. They shield their direct reports from outside interruptions as well. They do, however, interrupt when they get a sense of something slowing down or blocking. They'll work with the individual or team to quickly get things moving again.
Sadly, the former outnumbers the latter by like 9:1.
I think that open offices are great - for my competition. :-)
One advantages of being the "little independent consultant" is that I can control my environment. I think you can reduce a geniuses output by a fair percentage just by adding distractions (like all sitting at the same table as your colleagues).
> I haven't had a single job as a software engineer that didn't have a constant background of distractions and interruption that prevented work from getting done
Same here. It’s actually kind of mind-blowing how little I get done at work compared to hobby projects, despite feeling as though I’m working much harder. In my free time, I’ve written my own global illumination software from the ground up, my own website, and a few open source libraries. In the same time at work, maybe one tiny feature for one internal tool. I understand why it happens and why it is necessary to some extent, but it’s much less satisfying than seeing the substantial day-to-day progress that can be accomplished on a solo project.
While I completely agree, and I'm way more productive when I'm doing my work-from-home days, there's another thing that I think has a huge per-hour productivity boost for side projects:
You probably think more before you write. The time away (at the very least the time while spent on other work) gives you time to figure out what to do next, whether it's passively or actively. You're more prepared when you finally do something.
> My guess as to why organizations don't care about focus is that they value the perception of "getting things done"
You can categorize your interruptions to see where your org is failing. For me, it's people dropping in to ask questions because it is easier to walk by and get an answer than to dig in to the problem and find it themselves.
Time to document. We have an unwritten rule that you got to check the confluence page before asking someone in person. If the answer is there then you gotta get that person a beer or lunch pending on the issue.
It's fundamentally a legibility problem. Organizational incentives are all structured around what managers and executives can understand, and anything outside that scope is assumed to have negligible value.
Or to phrase it in a slightly bitter manner, the people in charge are mere humans like us with limited field of view, and the fact that they think they can capture everything in an MBA paradigm is a mismatch which generates avoidable inefficiency.
> This does not mean I don’t want to be around people, I very much do. I love collaboration, whiteboard sessions, small brainstorms, midday team coffees, and happy hour drinks. These things build community, make the work better, and are definitely needed.
So no meetings, but still yes to the constant small interruptions that you can't plan around? Uh, okay. I think I'd rather have the reverse, though. Something like: On Monday only talk to me if we have a meeting planned.
Not sure how multiple people working on a shared task needing to collaborate / whiteboard / discuss what they're doing qualifies as constant small interruptions.
In theory happy hour drinks and coffee breaks are things that happen when people aren't in the middle of productive working anyway.
I agree although it takes me time to get back in the zone so I like to block out all interruptions to flow (meetings, whiteboard sessions, etc.). Worst thing is having a meeting every other hour since that just ruins a day for me. I can handle occasional slack messages since they require little concentration to punt. It's part of why I WFH a few days a week and schedule all my meetings early in the week.
It's a little intense, but I like it, and I'm oh so bored of yet another black on white scheme. If we're gonna make the web a creative space again, there are gonna be some misses (I don't think this is one, but to each their own). Let's be a little charitable and keep our eye on the ball.
I like that people's personal sites don't have to be optimised for pleasing users and hence have so much variety to them, it's the one bit of the old internet that we still have with us
I feel like scroll hijacking is a recent thing, or at least I've started noticing it a lot more in the last few years. It's honestly so jarring 90% of the time, that my initial instinct is to reassess how badly I want to read the content!
I do not have a problem with it for full page scrolls though, which I know a lot of people hate. Or that one page that showcases the scale of the solar system by forcing you to scroll for ages!
IIRC parallax scrolling on the web became a thing roughly a decade ago. Initially only the cool kids were doing it, and the reaction was usually: cool, didn’t know you could do that on a web page. Fast forward a couple years, everyone and their mom is doing it for all kinds of wrong reasons (like in this case it’s used to load the previous/next article — if I want more I can click on a prev/next link, thanks) with crappy implementations, it’s tiring and hostile.
I wholly like the idea and is one that I preach and do my utter best to follow.
As context, my company is 95% remote in engineering (I'm a remote manager with some IC responsibilities). Of course, there is some of that internal pressure of making sure I am able to respond to slack in a timely manner. SO, I continually stress to take the deep work breaks and do everything I can to make sure that my team is protected from meetings or other outside requests.
Some explicit things we do as a team.
- Have 3 standing meetings, M/W/F for 30 minutes each. We are fluid with these times making sure that they work for everyone and are blocked next to other commitments. We also change the context of the "standups" to incorporate planning/retros, etc
- Thursdays are explicit "no meeting days" I fight back hard against anyone who tries to put engineers on my team in a meeting on Thursday. Unfortunately, I as a manager sometimes have no choice but to accept a meeting
- Tuesdays are recommended no meeting days
- It is ok to turn off slack/email. We all have each others phone numbers and will text if it is something actually urgent, which it almost never is.
- Our team is measured by how much we hit our deadlines, which we have input into how those deadlines are set
This is one of the best and most productive work environments I have ever been in -- it would be extremely difficult for me to move back to any office, especially an open one where productivity is proxied by seat time.
It’s a nice blog. I recently switched to a four day work week, which really takes back Mondays. I thought that’s what the author was going to say. I also only work 4-6 hour days, so it’s a 20 hour work week. I bill a tech rate but hourly. It’s enough to pay the bills (35yo, no family).
I’d really like to see our conversations about the work week move towards a total reduction in hours. It has been life changing for me to work this schedule. Sometimes I think about working a normal job again, but I couldn’t stand the hours.
Has anyone else here worked a shorter week regularly or considered it?
I worked 4 days (8 hours though) for a year, and it was just great. It is one day, but it makes you feel like half of your week is off (3 days of weekend, 4 days of work).
I also think that politically speaking, lowering standard working hours would create a much needed inflation, boosted consumption and employment at minor cost of material well being, so it's an interesting policy to pursue.
Yeah the perpetual three day weekends is a game changer.
And I agree this plays in to politics well. Reduced working hours would boost employment among other things. I’ve heard in some countries you can unilaterally declare how many hours you want to work and your employer is obliged to accept. I don’t know the details, but if it works it would be wonderful to have that here.
I’ve found a single employer with a project that is not time bounded, but he wants to spend as little as necessary on it. I’m building a solar powered farming robot. It’s kind of a side project for him that will hopefully turn in to more.
So while my specific situation is rare, I can attest that this work life balance is fantastic. We really need to be talking about reducing working hours. In the past 8 months at this job I’ve built an autonomous solar powered vehicle from scratch which can drive over the tops of plant rows. I did this while working 15-20 hours a week. I’d say that’s pretty good productivity. Later in the year I will be adding weeding tools to the inside of the vehicle.
I’m hoping we can open source it, but that depends on whether or not we can get philanthropic funding. If anyone sees this and could contribute financially to open source it please let me know!
I saw the John Cleese video about creativity years ago, and it completely changed my perspective for the better about how to actually achieve creative results reliably. In particular, I found very valuable the insight that you need to screw around in a focused way for a somewhat long period of time to really start the process. A 15 minute brainstorming session doesn't cut it.
I thoroughly recommend watching the John Cleese video. As you say, these are instructions on carving out some time (90 minutes) for creative thinking and better decision making; https://youtu.be/bC-gBeQYHls
That's not a great adage though. Sometimes the presentation is so poor that it impedes reading the content, and that line is going to be different for everyone.
@autach FYI: 1. posting opaque blobs of code is a faux pas or even rude on most fora; 2. * characters are eaten by HN comments (converted to italics) - use code formatting; 3. That is some hideous old code (NN4 compatible!, uses setInterval, setting innerHTML is a security bad smell), etc.
In case you're not able to declare certain days off limits, I suggest a strategy that has worked for me in the past: schedule your work time. If you need two days to work on something, fill those two days on your calendar. It can be broken up into smaller segments (I sometimes do it in 3 hour chunks), or just the whole day. This causes an important psychological change when someone tries to book a meeting, they can see your time on the calendar and will need to ask you to make space for their meeting. This is a lot different than seeing a wide open, empty day. It forces consideration of the tradeoffs. If you work in a thoughtful company, this is usually enough to get you some space to work in a more focused way.
Although this is primarily about "creative" work, the same is at least as true for mind-numbing administrative work, for two reasons:
1. If you don't really care that much for what you're doing (you have a worthless report due in three days) it's not as easy to get back in the zone as when you're doing something important.
2. You're happy to be distracted when doing something you don't care about. That makes sense - the distraction is most likely more important than what you're doing, so you're happy to have the excuse to meet with someone or answer an email.
And no, not all administrative work qualifies as creative. It's generally metawork that at best is necessary for your employer to continue to operate. Nobody cares how well you do it.
I still go to the office on Monday and Tuesday, and Wednesday, but I'm tuned out. I'm in Do-Mode. On Thursday, its build and demo and test, so I snap out of it and put things together for a releasable build.
Friday, fix bugs, do a new release for the test user to play with over the weekend.
Now, none of this is firm - break the rule if needed. But, generally, this helps keep a fat chunk of attention all the way up front, weekend->Thursday, that makes the magic happen.
Oddly enough, done right, it means Friday can be a slack day too.
It doesn’t load on my phone. Outline doesn’t work either so I guess the content is not important enough for the author to make it availabe for their readers..
What a gross way to assess a person's creative expression.
A lot of times, simply reaching out to an author and asking them to make their "content," available in your preferred manner is all it takes. Other times, the author, exercising their artistic merit, may say "hell no," to you, or perhaps "don't call my life's work 'content' you unsophisticated dweeb."
Who are you to judge something's worth based upon how easily you personally are able to consume it?
AndrewUnmuted, I am digging the article but I had to access it on my desktop. It's still not working on my phone and that was a comment of frustration and that happens to all of us. I am not calling anyone unsophisticated dweeb and that was really uncalled for.
Its interesting, that he centers on him being a 'creative person' and thus he needs a 3-day-meeting-week to function. Im more an engineer, and I keep a strict 2-day-meeting-week to operate at peak effeciency.
For the same reason browser vendors abolished the <marquee> and <blink> tags, this kind of unreadable color schemes should be reset by default by browsers, just like autoplaying videos, and pop-ups are suppressed.
And yet I'm confident that inevitably no one actually cares enough to contact the author and tell them that they need to change their site for reasons a, b and c.
This is a third-party news aggregator. It's very common that the submitter is not the author. So the author is usually not even in the vicinity to hear the complaining. All in all, just another manifestation of slacktivism.
As a "semi-retired old dude," I have been absolutely reveling in the productivity I have achieved, working at home. It's been awesome.
It isn't just because I'm working at home. I suspect that a lot of it is because I'm working alone.
I was a manager for a long time, and quickly realized that "team overhead" was the true enemy of productivity. This includes things like Slack convos, and water-cooler chats.
It's a long topic, but all sorts of things are required to enable a good team integration; especially if we need to have a bunch of less-experienced team members on board. I was fortunate to lead a team of very experienced engineers. We shared a vocabulary and a common vision, so a great deal of "basic" overhead was avoided.
The (big) downside of working alone, is that I need to keep the scope of my projects reasonable. I can get a lot more done than most lone developers, but it's still a great deal less than what can be accomplished by a tight team.
As long as we have teams, we'll have overhead challenges.