The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work

When I started working, more than 25 years ago, we had one team meeting per week (1 hour), very few other meetings. Cellphones were getting mainstream and people had these funny ringtones, but since communications were expensive, phones were not ringing often. The office phone was ringing even more seldomly. We had no ticketing system. Managers just trusted you for doing your work. When going to someone else desk we would start with "may I disturb you?", and the answer may have been "give me five minutes". We had like 2-3 emails a day. It turns out someone had the radio in the office. That was in Belgium and the radio was in Flemish. This was not a big deal since I do not understand Flemish. Despite being rather cramped, I remember this office as quiet. It was not a large open-space though.

I cannot remember the turning point. Of course "agile" did a lot of damage, then ticketing systems, the illusion that developers are swap-able, and now constant notification stream.

I am the author of this piece. It was something I put together as a curiosity and wanted to play with Astro. Hope you all enjoyed it!

The model assumes the day begins with focus time. My day always starts with me recovering from the stress of my commute.

I remember Jeff Bezos said that something like promoting more communication/collaboration is wrong.

And managers should focus on making people working independently.

I really like the reframe of controlling notifications/interruptions to minimizing "surprises". Because inside surprises fit not only notifications, but taskswitching, shifting todo lists, head/body movement and even music choices. The effect on the brain is similar for all cases.

While at some point in the optimization game Goodhart’s Law will also apply here, before that happens I thoroughly enjoyed the insights from reading it and will try implementing some version of it to gauge my productivity before jumping to another metric always aware of the abyss, the ultimate procrastination: being unproductive by trying too hard to optimize productivity.

Unproductivity is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my unproductivity. I will let it pass through me. When it is gone, only action will remain.

Jump!

If you're suffering from interruptions like this and not practicing some form of Dzogchen or Mahamudra, you're really doing yourself a disservice. Being able to alternate between awareness and non-awareness is a staple of these forms of meditation, and like all skills can be learned over time.

Another take on the matter is: interruptions are inevitable, so reducing the "recovery penalty" is key, and can be learned.

That's something that you learn to do when you have a kid: suddenly, your periods of 4 hours of focus free time (for coding, exploring tech, whatever) during the weekend just _disappear_. You only get max 30 minutes of free time in a day; this is extremely frustrating initially; there is no boss to complain to, no meetings to blame, no solution but to deal with it. Progressively, you learn to switch tasks much more efficiently, by making regular check points, so that you can get interrupted any time and get back to deep work _quickly_.

I found it odd that breaks (e.g. lunch) were not part of the mix.

that's too many words to just say "try to manage your time better".