My co-worker Fabs recently wrote an article about how he get’s work done, which inspired me to write down my recent learnings about my own productivity.

In the last year, I discovered different aspects of work life had a differently strong influence on my ability to work. In discussions with varying friends of mine, it became clear to me that these factors differ vastly from person to person. Therefore I think my setup will most likely not be the right one for you, but maybe you can learn from my past failures a bit.

Lesson #1: Live the grey areas

I started my new job at AIDA in Hamburg, and although I interviewed in a workplace with separated small offices, I arrived in an open office. After a few weeks, I was sure: I can not concentrate with all these people talking around me. So naturally, I went on for my search for really muting headphones and found the Beyerdynamic DT 770 M which I love. I had people in the office nearly screaming in my face, and I didn’t notice. Just what I have searched for.

So I went on to work with them all the time for the next couple of weeks, and I saw my co-workers stumble into problems I already solved or work on something I already had a branch for. I guess you already know what happened; it took me a bit longer to get it: I isolated myself so well that I only pulled knowledge out of my environment to get my work done, but I didn’t collaborate with them anymore. You can miss out so much if you don’t listen to discussions sometimes and that will hurt the team’s velocity a lot.

Currently, I am using my headphones just when I do Pomodoros, and that’s it. I don’t use the Pomodoro technique all the time, so I listen to what my peers are discussing some time, and at other times I work with no interruptions.

Lesson #2: Structure is key

At my previous company, there was always some fire that needed my immediate attention. Some were bigger and couldn’t be ignored; some were a little smaller but not to be forgotten. As I changed jobs to Mesosphere, I had to develop another system rather than jumping on the problem that screams the loudest. We stick more closely to the sprint, we work with a lot of code reviews, and we also have some side-projects to improve the overall code quality or development speed. This leaves me with a lot of room to set my personal preferences and priorities with the things I want to work on.

For me, it was a challenge to fill this room, to structure my days and weeks to keep track of the things I wanted to improve in our product and development workflow. My colleague Daniel helped me by recommending the Productivity Planner workbook to me. It now lives on my desk (or in my backpack if I work from home) and helps me to structure my day around pomodoros. Let me show you the inside: