Deep work as a developer and the hive mind of companies
One of my favourite books of all time is “Deep Work” by Cal Newport. Newport discusses the idea that in today's knowledge work economy, we must prioritise the act of focused attention on the most important task. If you are a writer this is writing your novel, if you are a programmer this is planning, writing, and testing your code to complete a ticket. I wrote previously on the distractions in our world, but recently, I have changed jobs. One in which I was at a client which required 8 hours of continuous distractions. Every microsecond of your time was sucked into responding to message after message, attending meeting upon meeting. I would estimate that in a given week I would get around 30 minutes of deep work in. With meetings every second hour on average, then the need to catch up on messages because you had meetings every second hour, this made it neigh impossible to actually achieve anything.
Contrast this with my new workplace. Granted, I have moved from tech lead to a senior developer, but even with that in mind, the company culture is drastically different. For starters, there isn’t a constant need to respond to people. Furthermore, there isn’t a meeting every second hour. Consequently, I can actually spend time each day focusing on a task at hand, diving deep into it. For example, I was able to spend almost the entire 8 hours of last Friday on a ticket. I had a total of an hour of meetings, the rest was time I could focus on the task at hand. I was shocked by how much I achieved in that time, it was a task that I expected to take a week and so far, it looks like it will take significantly less time than that. Why? Because I actually get time to dive into the ticket, not spend 30 minutes here and there between meetings.
As I mentioned, this comes down to the differences in position, but it also comes down to the difference in the company culture. One is relaxed, allows you to spend more time on tasks and as a result everyone is much happier to be there. The other “burns & churns” their staff, not a soul wishes to be there. At the end of Friday, I wasn’t waiting for the day to end, I was disappointed that it was over. The stress that comes with the always switched on hive mind that is a lot of companies these days, is monumental. Humans are not wired to bounce between task, message, and interruptions. Humans are designed to focus on a task for a few hours at a time. I can cite plenty of resources on why this is the case, but “Deep Work” by Cal Newport does a much better job, take a read. The point is that when you finish a workweek, you’re not proud of the time you spent when all you achieved was meetings and Slack messages. You become fulfilled when you can look back and see that you had time to focus on this task and that. Even if you get a bug ticket that drains the life out of you. It takes you days to solve, you cry, and you swear, but at the end of it you can look back in admiration that you achieved something difficult. It’s not difficult to sit in a meeting and say five words. Furthermore, it’s not difficult to respond to message after message, or respond to emails. It’s also not rewarding, it’s just stressful, your brain can’t handle the constant noise, the constant distraction. Your brain thrives off calm, clear, focus on a task.
When I was a kid I loved cards, trading cards, such as Pokémon and Yugioh, I could spend hours sorting them, making decks, reading about them. Some of my calmest, happiest memories involve me performing tasks like that, take building lego as another example. These are tasks you perform that can be or cannot be mentally taxing, but the key point is they stick out in your memory because you had deep focus on them. You don’t think about the time you spent 8 hours jumping between Slack messages and meetings, you do think about the tricky feature you added that took days of your time. Your brain is wired to focus on tasks, complete them, and reward you with Dopamine at a significant hit. Your brain is tricked into the small Dopamine hits of a new message, the red bubble with a number on it. It’s next to impossible to resist, so you click it, and you have your focus sucked away, taking time to get it back. Repeat this enough times, and it’s the end of the day, having achieved nothing.
What can you actually do about it?
Well, for me, it was moving companies, so far, so good. Although, this could change the company culture around distractions and technologies such as Slack and Teams are much more advanced. Picking a company that doesn’t have deadline months ahead of anything even remotely achievable also helps. If you’re not in a position to leave, then it involves changing at least some surrounding culture. Reducing the number of meetings is a great start, nothing breaks your attention like carting yourself off to a meeting that you don’t need to attend. Speaking up about reducing the number of meetings and pulling out of meetings when you don’t feel you can contribute much, if anything, is also a good start. The last couple of methods you can use is switching your device to “Do Not Disturb”, for me, I was in an environment that had constant noise, “Do Not Disturb”, noise gone. Just removing this reduces the times you get your attention stolen, coupling this with set times that you check your messages. With this method, you drastically reduce the amount of outside influences affecting you. This won’t change the company culture, but it does allow your time to be a little more valuable. The more time you have to actually work, the more value you provide to the company. The more value you provide to the company, the more you are compensated and the more you get out of your career.
Working at a job that rewards deep work, that allows deep work, is fulfilling, much less stressful, and you get to see the fruits of your labour. Your brain is rewarded for the hours you put in, each week you feel that you made clear progress towards a goal. Deep work is the cornerstone of a fulfilling career. Just because your company specialises in being a “collaborative” hive mind, doesn’t mean that it's a good thing. I would argue this is the antithesis of productivity. People don’t produce high-quality work when they are plugged into the company matrix. They produce their best work when they can wander off in a direction with some loose guidelines. Passing the creativity off to the person working on the task. People are creative, they love to produce work that they are proud of, allowing people to do this is critical to any company having even a semblance of enjoyment for their staff.