Calm in a distracted world or the annoying green bubble

Phones are an integral part of our lives, from bank accounts to social media, phones are vital to 21st century life. On the contrary, the more tied to a phone you are the less ability you have to perform focused, meaningful work, as Cal Newport calls it “Deep Work”. The second part to this distracted world is email and messaging applications. When you were a kid, attempting as you may to complete some homework, everything would distract you. Your mother would turn the TV off, you would need quiet and still, the dog walking up next to you would be enough of a distraction. In today’s age, children have to add phones to that list as well, depending on the age. Now think about your average workday, for myself I would receive hundreds of messages in a day. This is incredibly distracting, that little notification and sound popping up every five seconds. It became too much, I turned my laptop onto “do not disturb” mode permanently. It was just enough to not have the constant “ping” sound, which even after replacing Slack's default sound, still drove me mad. The quiet was incredible, boy was it peaceful. However, it didn’t solve the problem. The problem isn’t that the sound is distracting, although it is, the greater problem is the constant need to appear online and available. I’m uncertain if this is just me, but when I look at Slack and see the little bubble indicator next to someone's name, I’m immediately thinking about if my bubble is green. Now add to that, if you work at a company that has multiple messaging applications, you have to appear online and attentive on multiple fronts. I work at a place that has two slack teams, a Microsoft Teams channels and a Microsoft Teams team group thing, I’m not entirely sure what they call it. All I know is it is too much, not to mention email, which thankfully I get very little of. Remaining attentive to all of them is impossible, I mostly miss the MS Team's side of things because that application is awful. However, the point still stands, if I’m not attentive on all platforms, in all locations, then it appears that I am dropping the ball. If I’m not allowed time to perform deep work, then I am dropping the ball. The workplace has been infected with a disease, and that disease is always on chat applications. First came email, second came chat applications. With email, it was at least somewhat expected that you could be asynchronous, in a sense it mimicked letters. With chat applications, good luck, you even have a status indicator on whether you are tapping the keys or not. Not to mention the damn green bubble, forever taunting you to be “online”.

There would be days I would sit down at 9am, “pop” and “ping”, suddenly it's 5pm. I would look back on the day and think to myself, what did I actually achieve in the day. Often it was a productive day, I helped out other developers, pairing for the majority of the day. Others it would be hopping from one item to the next based on what people had “pinged” me about. It was so atrocious at one point of the project that I would spend less than five minutes on a task only to be messaged about something else, to immediately jump on that. It then started a loop of jumping from A, to B, to C, to getting asked about A again. It drove me to the brink of insanity, so I turned on do not disturb. Ahhh peace and quiet, it didn’t solve the problem, though. I was still getting the same number of messages, I just couldn’t hear them, that's a start at the very least.

How does one solve this?

Knowledge workers are not paid to send Slack messages, nor are they paid to write emails. I am paid to write code, deliver projects, work closely with my team, get people un-stuck and make technical decisions. Sometimes people need me to do things, others need a question answered, perhaps a developer needs help. Time blocking and keeping a record of your day in a running text file is just about the only way I can fit being productive in a world of reckless attention destroying normality. Each day I open a file and list the tasks I have, bring over any from the previous day, and then pick one to start on. Whenever, I get a message or attend a meeting and some lovely individual asks me “can you get x data on y API for z team?”, “sure” I respond, *as it's added to the end of my to-do list*. Furthermore, the list is a record of tasks not only dated, but a record of what you have done that day, what you didn’t get done and nothing falls through the cracks. You won’t forget to do something when it’s written down. The firehose of messages you get, asking for this, that and the other, get added to your list. Sure, they are still annoying and distracting, but at least you aren’t jumping between tasks just because someone asked you to.

Protecting your time with time blocking is another technique discussed in many books, articles, and podcasts. This I find to be one of the hardest things to achieve. It’s all well and good to say between 9-11am I code, but you bloody well answer the phone when your boss calls. Time blocking is the art of sectioning off your hours, allocating parts of your day to certain tasks and only those tasks. You might have a period of time for deep work, one for checking emails, one for lunch and then some more deep work later on. Scattered around, you might also have meetings. However, I find this all falls apart when you have meetings, especially in places that have more meetings per day than hours in a day. Standing up to your boss, or your boss’ boss about not attending a meeting or not answering a message three microseconds after it is sent, is difficult. In today’s workplace, even when you are in the office, you have to be attentive to the attention of others. Simply not responding for hours won’t be good enough, you become an outcast. Yet, this is precisely what the doctor ordered. The days when you bounce from task to task, sit in meetings for 18 hours straight or answer messages all day, are the days that you achieve virtually nothing. It takes 15-20 minutes to get back into the focus of the task at hand. There is simply no way that any worker is not getting distracted this often in the modern world. How is it possible to work when someone keeps messaging you about something you have to then drop, figure out, and get back to them about. I’m not saying you should throw out all contact, no, other developers need help and so will you. Instead, time block sections of the day you can help others, or create an exception for helping others. Be careful, it's not helping others on their terms, it's helping others on the tasks that truly matter. If a developer comes to you with a code problem, you need to help them, or schedule some time to help them. The code is important, completing features is what you are paid for. If someone comes to you and asks for technical thoughts on a question, such as your boss, they can wait. They don’t need an answer now, more than likely. If they do, if it’s truly critical, which it probably isn’t, then you can attend to it. I would stress the importance of creating an expectation that you respond when you can, not when they want you to.

Ultimately, this all depends on what level of the ladder you are. If you’re a developer, anything that isn’t code is second rate, you are paid to code and to help others code. If you are a manager, this is unavoidable, you live a distracted life, and you can’t do much about it. The biggest blur between these lines is the tech lead. As a lead, you are the bridge between the developers and the outer world. You are both tasked with helping developers and guiding the team to its destination. Being a tech lead is enormously rewarding, it’s also enormously distracting.

The new normal

You shouldn’t have a chat application open on your computer during the hours you need to achieve anything remotely important. This is next to impossible in 2022, however, by turning on “do not disturb”, and time blocking areas to check it, you can curb some of the distraction. I wish there was a world, and in fairness there are some companies that do this, in which I don’t have to have that green bubble. I don’t care if Jim is online, I just care that sometime in the workday, I get a response. If it’s critical, I suppose I can call, although I find that extremely rude. Cold calling people in the middle of the day has to be just about be the most annoying thing you can do to someone else. You know they are working, yet you call them anyway. If that person is a subordinate, then they feel obligated to pick up, distracting them from their work to answer what is probably a meaningless question, let’s be honest here. Rarely are we working for a company where time is a critical factor, delaying a response by an hour or two won’t cause anyone to die, just your manager to die internally. Let them, deep work is what you are paid for, it’s what you are good at, what humans are good at. The norm should be hours for a response, not minutes, creating this expectation is hard, but necessary.

Protecting your time shouldn’t be a requirement, but it is. In a world with all these distractions, it is a skill you must practice. For me, the worst part about the highly distracted world is not the lack of work that you achieve, but the constant feeling of being out of control. The charged and stressed feeling that consumes you in the days when you jump from task to task at a whim is detrimental to say the least. I am still working on this skill of curbing the distractions, it's hard, impossible it seems, but it can be improved. When it is achieved, you output higher quality, in less time, your mind becomes clear and your body is calm.