I’m lucky to not have many meetings in my current dev job, but I get the same effect from having a dozen people a day asking for “quick” fixes for various bugs that are conveniently always more urgent than whatever big task I’m in the middle of.
The bug fixes themselves can have massive cognitive overhead. I’ve spent hours thinking about a problem to make a very small change. It takes focus to fix complex problems correctly.
If only. The past couple jobs I’ve had, everyone acts as if they have multiple jobs. It’s a rare privilege to be focused on a few responsibilities only.
Do you not have a bug tracker or ticketing system of some sort to manage these things coming your way?
Incredibly few people at my work get much more than dismissive small talk from just walking up or from sending me a message expecting me to re-prioritize everything else for their special pet problem.
My manager sets my priorities, any changes to that need to come from him. They can take it up with him if they don’t like it or disagree.
I don’t respond to IMs or emails not from my boss or from my own team except when I’ve hit a mental road block and need to think about something else to refresh.
And I don’t actually work on any of those requests until there’s a ticket in. If someone comes to me asking why my main job duty isn’t done, I’m sure as hell going to have a paper trail documenting who fucked up the timeline. No ticket, no work.
That also puts some weight on anyone else able to pick up tickets for your team to do it, so it’s not always falling to you because you’re not jaded enough to say no.
Hahaha I wish. There isn’t any real “management” to speak of where I’m at, and it’s a flat structure, meaning literally anyone can send me work and I’m just expected to do it. Right now I’m working the weekend to finish a task that someone else couldn’t do and it fell to me. There’s a ticketing system, but it’s only really half-used (of course, I myself turn these tasks into tickets, but that’s about it).
Trying to slowly change all this over time, because I love my job outside of this lack of management, but I also don’t hold any delusions about that.
Jesus fuck I would hate to work with you. At my job there’s a lot of teams working on a lot of projects with very tight deadlines, and if every request had to be routed through managers it would take 10x as long. When we ask people from other teams directly for help, “I’m sorry I’m too busy right now” is a perfectly acceptable response because we’ve all been there. We don’t need our managers to act like playground referees.
We’re all intelligent and capable workers and we get paid well to take initiative and solve things without running to mommy.
If every request is an emergency that needs to immediately interrupt everything else, then your throughput is drastically reduced. The extra cognitive load that comes from the interrupts also affects throughput. If you constantly have to watch DMs/channels/email for work that might pull you away from your existing work, you’re not hitting a deep work state.
Unless your role is intentionally interrupt-driven requests, it’s much better to drop items in a queue to be processed regularly. The tighter the deadlines, the more important moving from interrupt-driven to queue-driven is. The last 30+ years of workflow research coupled with neuroscience have really highlighted the efficacy of queues.
If every request is an emergency, then your company is horrible at sharing info because teams don’t know the overall goal of the company and where their team’s “emergency” ranks in that. Something that’s a high priority for my team might not be a high priority overall, and everyone on my team needs to understand when that is the case. There’s been plenty of times when teams have had to rebalance priorities because someone with the ability to fix their blocker is tied up with something more important.
That’s knowledge that shouldn’t be exclusive to managers. There shouldn’t be any need to involve managers in that other than to keep them informed of the situation.
The tighter the deadlines, the more important moving from interrupt-driven to queue-driven is.
I heartily disagree. Queues might be good when all the humans involved are shit at their jobs (which admittedly is a lot of workspaces) but otherwise, inserting extra friction between problem and solution is not and cannot be helpful.
I also think a “deep work state” is a myth for anything except certain types of coding, lab work, etc that legitimately require a shift in mental focus due to the nature of the work. For the vast majority of jobs, work is work.
If you’re a software programmer or a worker in an industrial factory, sure, you need uninterrupted time to get into the flow of things. For most jobs, interruptions are fine. You can prioritize and either shift focus or put the new request on the back burner.
(which by the way is where I think tickets excel: at keeping track of progress. Not at designating priority.)
Bullshit. Unsourced, but I think I found the study. Sample size: 48 college kids pretending to do a job they have no experience in. Besides, they found that interrupted work gets done faster at the same quality when interrupted! Not that I agree with such a limited study, but if I did, it would support what I’m saying.
Check flow state citations in intro
Sure, “flow” is a thing, but intense, focused concentration on a single task is a small minority of jobs, as I alluded to in my last comment. Most jobs (especially office jobs) require quickly swapping between several different mental points of focus.
Search for “lean [your field]” and whichever lean principle you’re curious about
The least productive meeting I’ve ever had was where my company brought in some Lean specialist and paid him more money than I think I want to know about to have us play card games and sell us on some oversimplified bullshit that we all promptly forgot after the next day, and gave us some cool certificates. It’s a way of thinking about things and organizing priorities that is resonable if you’re not an idiot but overly restrictive if you dogmatically adhere to it (which you will do, if you’re an idiot). Lean consists of a lot of good ideas that a smart manager will listen to and attempt to implement because they’re just good ideas. If you need it wrapped up in a package and labeled as “lean” then you’re not a good manager.
I feel like all the various “how to do your job” philosophies are a lot like diets. Sure, they all have pros and cons and some are better researched than other but 98% of it is just make sure calories in < calories out. Picking specific diets is just gonna change that other 2%. For work, the 98% is just “do your job, if a problem comes up fix it”. The obvious prerequisite to that is knowledge and ability; a lot of companies are so siloed that individual workers don’t understand where they fit in with the company’s goals, and that’s an institutional problem. And by ability I don’t just mean competence, I also mean things like having the permission to fix problems without manager approval, etc. Or the ability to go to someone on another team without having to route everything through your respective managers.
To bring that back to meetings specifically, there’s a lot of bullshit meetings out there, I think we all agree on that. But they shouldn’t kill your productivity for the rest of the day (or leading up to the meeting). That’s not normal. That’s why we’re in the ADHD community with this post. Minor interruptions may stop your “flow”, and if you’re in one of those jobs where you need it, that’s not good. But for most jobs, you don’t need flow. You need flexibility. Minor interruptions should not prevent you from doing your job. For a lot of jobs, minor interruptions are the job, or a critical part of it.
All of the science isn’t based on a single study with fifty college kids. Here’s another one and another one and another one and a meta study. Since you disagree with accepted science and literature, I’m gonna disengage. If you’d like to provide more than your interpretation of the world, I’d be happy to continue. I’d take some analysis on cognitive load, maybe some understanding that people other than you exist, certainly less rambling about a specific bad experience(s) you’ve had with explicit methodologies.
I don’t disagree with the experiments themselves, I just think the results are too broadly applied to “work” rather than “the specific task replicated in the study”. The meta study you linked actually brings up that point, but it’s paywalled and the abstract doesn’t give the results. I’d be interested to see their conclusions.
I’m lucky to not have many meetings in my current dev job, but I get the same effect from having a dozen people a day asking for “quick” fixes for various bugs that are conveniently always more urgent than whatever big task I’m in the middle of.
The bug fixes themselves can have massive cognitive overhead. I’ve spent hours thinking about a problem to make a very small change. It takes focus to fix complex problems correctly.
Sounds like that should be someone’s full time job, not pulling someone else away from their actual job.
If only. The past couple jobs I’ve had, everyone acts as if they have multiple jobs. It’s a rare privilege to be focused on a few responsibilities only.
Or put it in a list or have a dedicated morning for the bugs.
Do you not have a bug tracker or ticketing system of some sort to manage these things coming your way?
Incredibly few people at my work get much more than dismissive small talk from just walking up or from sending me a message expecting me to re-prioritize everything else for their special pet problem.
My manager sets my priorities, any changes to that need to come from him. They can take it up with him if they don’t like it or disagree.
I don’t respond to IMs or emails not from my boss or from my own team except when I’ve hit a mental road block and need to think about something else to refresh.
And I don’t actually work on any of those requests until there’s a ticket in. If someone comes to me asking why my main job duty isn’t done, I’m sure as hell going to have a paper trail documenting who fucked up the timeline. No ticket, no work.
That also puts some weight on anyone else able to pick up tickets for your team to do it, so it’s not always falling to you because you’re not jaded enough to say no.
Hahaha I wish. There isn’t any real “management” to speak of where I’m at, and it’s a flat structure, meaning literally anyone can send me work and I’m just expected to do it. Right now I’m working the weekend to finish a task that someone else couldn’t do and it fell to me. There’s a ticketing system, but it’s only really half-used (of course, I myself turn these tasks into tickets, but that’s about it).
Trying to slowly change all this over time, because I love my job outside of this lack of management, but I also don’t hold any delusions about that.
Jesus fuck I would hate to work with you. At my job there’s a lot of teams working on a lot of projects with very tight deadlines, and if every request had to be routed through managers it would take 10x as long. When we ask people from other teams directly for help, “I’m sorry I’m too busy right now” is a perfectly acceptable response because we’ve all been there. We don’t need our managers to act like playground referees.
We’re all intelligent and capable workers and we get paid well to take initiative and solve things without running to mommy.
If every request is an emergency that needs to immediately interrupt everything else, then your throughput is drastically reduced. The extra cognitive load that comes from the interrupts also affects throughput. If you constantly have to watch DMs/channels/email for work that might pull you away from your existing work, you’re not hitting a deep work state.
Unless your role is intentionally interrupt-driven requests, it’s much better to drop items in a queue to be processed regularly. The tighter the deadlines, the more important moving from interrupt-driven to queue-driven is. The last 30+ years of workflow research coupled with neuroscience have really highlighted the efficacy of queues.
If every request is an emergency, then your company is horrible at sharing info because teams don’t know the overall goal of the company and where their team’s “emergency” ranks in that. Something that’s a high priority for my team might not be a high priority overall, and everyone on my team needs to understand when that is the case. There’s been plenty of times when teams have had to rebalance priorities because someone with the ability to fix their blocker is tied up with something more important.
That’s knowledge that shouldn’t be exclusive to managers. There shouldn’t be any need to involve managers in that other than to keep them informed of the situation.
I heartily disagree. Queues might be good when all the humans involved are shit at their jobs (which admittedly is a lot of workspaces) but otherwise, inserting extra friction between problem and solution is not and cannot be helpful.
I also think a “deep work state” is a myth for anything except certain types of coding, lab work, etc that legitimately require a shift in mental focus due to the nature of the work. For the vast majority of jobs, work is work.
If you’re a software programmer or a worker in an industrial factory, sure, you need uninterrupted time to get into the flow of things. For most jobs, interruptions are fine. You can prioritize and either shift focus or put the new request on the back burner.
(which by the way is where I think tickets excel: at keeping track of progress. Not at designating priority.)
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I’d really like to see some citations.
I know sharing facts won’t necessarily change your opinion; I wanted to highlight I’m not talking out of my ass to everyone else reading the thread.
Bullshit. Unsourced, but I think I found the study. Sample size: 48 college kids pretending to do a job they have no experience in. Besides, they found that interrupted work gets done faster at the same quality when interrupted! Not that I agree with such a limited study, but if I did, it would support what I’m saying.
Sure, “flow” is a thing, but intense, focused concentration on a single task is a small minority of jobs, as I alluded to in my last comment. Most jobs (especially office jobs) require quickly swapping between several different mental points of focus.
The least productive meeting I’ve ever had was where my company brought in some Lean specialist and paid him more money than I think I want to know about to have us play card games and sell us on some oversimplified bullshit that we all promptly forgot after the next day, and gave us some cool certificates. It’s a way of thinking about things and organizing priorities that is resonable if you’re not an idiot but overly restrictive if you dogmatically adhere to it (which you will do, if you’re an idiot). Lean consists of a lot of good ideas that a smart manager will listen to and attempt to implement because they’re just good ideas. If you need it wrapped up in a package and labeled as “lean” then you’re not a good manager.
I feel like all the various “how to do your job” philosophies are a lot like diets. Sure, they all have pros and cons and some are better researched than other but 98% of it is just make sure calories in < calories out. Picking specific diets is just gonna change that other 2%. For work, the 98% is just “do your job, if a problem comes up fix it”. The obvious prerequisite to that is knowledge and ability; a lot of companies are so siloed that individual workers don’t understand where they fit in with the company’s goals, and that’s an institutional problem. And by ability I don’t just mean competence, I also mean things like having the permission to fix problems without manager approval, etc. Or the ability to go to someone on another team without having to route everything through your respective managers.
To bring that back to meetings specifically, there’s a lot of bullshit meetings out there, I think we all agree on that. But they shouldn’t kill your productivity for the rest of the day (or leading up to the meeting). That’s not normal. That’s why we’re in the ADHD community with this post. Minor interruptions may stop your “flow”, and if you’re in one of those jobs where you need it, that’s not good. But for most jobs, you don’t need flow. You need flexibility. Minor interruptions should not prevent you from doing your job. For a lot of jobs, minor interruptions are the job, or a critical part of it.
All of the science isn’t based on a single study with fifty college kids. Here’s another one and another one and another one and a meta study. Since you disagree with accepted science and literature, I’m gonna disengage. If you’d like to provide more than your interpretation of the world, I’d be happy to continue. I’d take some analysis on cognitive load, maybe some understanding that people other than you exist, certainly less rambling about a specific bad experience(s) you’ve had with explicit methodologies.
I don’t disagree with the experiments themselves, I just think the results are too broadly applied to “work” rather than “the specific task replicated in the study”. The meta study you linked actually brings up that point, but it’s paywalled and the abstract doesn’t give the results. I’d be interested to see their conclusions.