No Interruptions

Getting productive at work

We’re in the business of solving problems. Sometimes hard or complex problems. We all know a lot of engineers and developers that use the early morning or the late night hours to get things done. Why is that?

This is obviously the timeframe where the chance of being distracted is relatively low. No Twitter/Facebook streams, no phone calls, nothing on tv, no meetings, no sideline questions. Nothing to pull you out of the zone.

Getting into the zone is a hard task for itself, but being interrupted every fifteen or so minutes means there is no chance for long periods of focused problem solving. Collaboration is great — this has been widely adopted in Software Engineering, think XP, think mob programming, think agile per se. Only that every now and then we need to dive very deep into a problem to solve it efficiently. Sometimes there are no shortcuts — sometimes it takes focus and clear thinking to solve problems efficiently.

There is a time for collaboration and a time for concentrated individual work. We need to focus on both and create the environment to support these approaches. Being professional also means knowing which approach will make more sense. It might make no sense to always throw five people on every problem.