In almost every retro I've been in, 'communication' has been near the top of the list of complaints. Everyone wants to be informed, but nobody wants to take the time to receive the information.
For developers, every meeting is a interruption. Every email a distraction. Yet 'nobody ever tells us nothing'.
I know there is a happy medium, but it seems the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction these days.
There's often too much communication happening, most of it irrelevant to the people recieving it.
I've got... 2000+ messages in my inbox right now, and get something like 100 or more per day.
A lot of these are automated alerts for systems I don't manage, and so get rule-filed into the trash.
The rest are meetings, status request updates, and other folderol that has nothing to do with me, often nothing to do with my department, and was a waste of time for someone to enter my name into the address field. Or a waste of time for me to be on a specific group mailing list.
rant mode on
Group distro lists need to go away because it's too easy and too thoughtless to email people who don't know or care about what it is the other person is mailing about. It encourages the "Well, I need to make sure $group knows about $thing, so I'll just use $group_distro_list" mindset, even though $group_distro_list has over 100 people on it and perhaps only 1-5 care about the content of the message.
Meetings. Roughly 90% of the meetings I get invited to don't concern me even tangentially. Of the remaining 10%, most of those could be handled over an email or IM. Email isn't used because, as mentioned before, it's a dumping ground for white noise. IM could be, and we're trying to get our PM's on board with that, but with with meeting subjects like: "You're on X Y and Z project, what is your status on this?" (repeated n times for n participants) - nothing that required disrupting the mental state of 10 or more people and bringing productivity to a halt for 2 or more hours.
People want communication, not noise. Irrelevant communication is noise.
If you have 2000+ emails in your inbox, you need an assistant and/or you need to delegate. Most people who need an assistant do not realize they do. In fact I will say most people should have one, even if part time, even if in another economy where they can afford.
> A lot of these are automated alerts for systems I don't manage, and so get rule-filed into the trash.
So what's the problem? If I'm counting all automated alerts and notifications, reminders from bugtracker, VCS and CI, mailing lists and not that important stuff that happens to have my email in CC — there's probably much more than 100 emails per day. You know what? It doesn't really bother me. Thunderbird has filters for that. Since I have figured out what do I care about, my inbox is almost empty: all stuff gets sorted out by folders automatically, most of it marked as read immediately and most likely I won't even see it if something really unexpected doesn't happen; for another 50-80 I will read titles and occasionally skim through some of them if I feel like that, just to keep myself updated. I've got 10 emails left in my inbox to be sorted manually on the quiet day, only 3 of them turn out to be something important and will stay in the inbox for a while. So, with the help of filters and 20 specialized folders in the end of the day I'm left feeling almost lonely and longing for human communication. All that email isn't really noise for me, as it doesn't distract me from anything.
The automated messages are easy - they go directly into the trash by sender and subject.
The problem is I have to live in my inbox and actually process a lot of this junk in case I'm one of the people who one of these shotgun emails is actually relevant to. I can't just direct the other department's PM into the circular file, even though their messages have no importance to me more often than not - have to read each one and verify that.
> People want communication, not noise. Irrelevant communication is noise.
Maybe I'm lucky that I have a good manager, but if this were my situation, I'd escalate things to him and explain that it's hurting my productivity, and likely the productivity of everyone else I work with.
I really appreciate well-curated and organized task lists for this. I know its unreasonable to be updated on every single project update, but if I can manually comb through updates and progress, I find it to be the best of both worlds.
Of course, then you need the whole team to be on board and diligent about task tracking, but that's a different ballgame.
Like many of you, I'm sure, I've been plagued by interruptions at work for years and years. For most of those years, I've ranted about how bad it is, and gone to antisocial extremes like hanging office hours signs on the back of my chair closing the door and not answering knocks, hiding out in quiet places, and more. All of my tactics largely failed, people ignore my requests for quiet because "it's just a really quick question." It's always just a "quick" question, that is never satisfied with a quick answer.
But lately I'm turning around and feeling like interruptions are a sign that communication needs to be happening that isn't, and asking the question, "how can the things we're interrupting each other about be communicated on a schedule we expect and can batch, rather that being surprised by it in continuous small increments?" It might be a failure to manage properly, or it might be poor documentation (say it ain't so!) or it might be that interruptions are necessary and healthy and I've been swimming upstream instead of going with the flow.
It's not like anyone wants or needs more meetings, but a lot of important talk happens on nobody's schedule, and I'm realizing (especially as I get older and manage people & start my own company) that much of how a company runs depends heavily on impromptu communication, and that cutting it off might be wildly bad. But, this post and others are right about the cost of context switching, so clearly we need some balance.
I have no answers, other than I know the entire company has to be in on and agree to any interruption mitigation plan. I want some magical software that will arrange batches of impromptu meetings every hour or so, that everyone in the company would use willingly, just to keep the interruptions from being a constant stream.
Email can be a good middle ground as long as there are no popups. The important thing is much of this background communication works as long as people need to respond quickly as in <4h, but not right now.
Generally where email falls down is back and forth communication, but giving people a little time to think about something before a discussion can save a lot of time. The trick is to also have regular add hock meetings without interrupting people. An informal schedule might look like 1h post scrum is communication time; 12-4 is work time where leave people alone unless you have absolutely nothing else you can work on. And then 4-5 is a last chance to bother people before people start heading home.
PS: If you have a shared calendar it’s not a bad idea to block out ~12-4 so people look occupied on IM.
The problem I have with getting rid of distractions is that it comes at a cost of isolation.
The distraction topic comes up often where I work. People have become more aware and respectful of distractions. Earbuds and Skype status are key indicators. But letting people know you are diving into something is even more important. It is largely a success. I haven't offended any coworkers and it does not prevent meaningful work getting done or stop someone from getting their questions answered. But then again this also means you might go half a day without any meaningful interactions with someone. Be careful what you wish for.
Skype has been a huge help (but also a huge distraction itself). It is helpful to have a coworker Skype "I have a question can you come by" and be able to respond "ok give me 10 minutes". It gives you that valuable time to be able to leave something in a state where you can return and pick up.
"Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."
I can't help noticing that we used to solve this with a universal convention called an office door. If your door was closed, you were asking not to be interrupted unless it was essential. If your door was open, you were available to work with others if they needed you.
I've seen a lot of arguments over the years about the pros and cons of open office spaces, and how generally greater awareness of what's happening and informal, ad-hoc contributions make the team as a whole more productive even if they aren't optimal for team members in isolation. Some of them do seem plausible.
However, I came to the conclusion that a lot of those arguments are unrealistic not long after first going freelance. I was then working at my own office, with my own equipment and software, on my own timescales, and with the ability to simply turn phones and e-mail off when I need to concentrate. It is amazing how much more productive that made me, compared to my previous job in an open plan office. I often do things in a day that I would have expected to take a week or more in the kind of high-distraction, open environments I worked in as an employee.
It's true that you need to communicate effectively if you have some separation, and that means making some changes if you're working remotely most of the time. It's also true that it's useful to get together face-to-face and catch up with colleagues from time to time, particularly if a project is moving rapidly. However, neither of those things requires full-time availability and being permanently subject to interruption. If get-together time is consolidated and planned in advance, I find it's still plenty fast and effective enough for probably 9 things out of 10 that aren't done on-line or with pre-planned calls anyway, and the other time someone just goes to where someone else is at shorter notice if it looks like it will be useful to be in the same place for a while.
So, for productivity, I personally rate having a few days a month set aside for face-to-face time but the rest mostly free of distractions far higher than having a few hours of useful work every day but also getting interrupted by multiple calls and such throughout that time.
The last big corporation I worked at, they had pretty strict protocols when you needed help from a co-worker.
It started with an IM, if the person was listed as being in a meeting or had their DND status on, you couldn't IM them. If they were available, you had to ask, "Do you have a minute." and they were free to answer "no" and then set up a time to IM you back later.
If an IM was unsuccessful, or if the person was not on IM for some reason, you could then email them and you had to wait for a response before doing anything else. This was of course after you had gone through the IM process.
If the person wasn't on IM or didn't answer your email (the person had an hour to respond to your email), then and only then were you allowed to go to their desk. If they were at their desk, you still had to ask if they had time to talk. They could still say "no" and you had to accept whatever time frame they set to talk later.
If all of these were unsuccessful, then you had the final option to go to your manager. The only advantage was your manager started with an email and had 30 minutes to answer any emails with "911" In the message title.
The rules seemed pretty archaic, but if you followed them, you'd find they were pretty efficient in promoting a very quiet office, with little or no distractions. There were periods were I could go hours without needing my headphones - it was pretty amazing.
Open office layouts are the worst for interruptions because of the inadvertant visual interruptions that occur constantly e.g. people passing your desk
You can turn off IM and email for extended periods to disable popups, and you can wear headphones to shield you from noise, but it's hard to shield your peripheral vision from constantly moving people (who may also smile or wave - expecting a response in turn) without a structure like a private office or cubicle
Given their cost economics, open layouts are probably not going anywhere in a world of rising office rents.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, since spontaneous conversation encourages creativity. The real problem is signaling what state you're in. Everyone looks the same on a computer, so it's hard to tell who's in the zone and who's available.
What if we took a huge glass conference room and dedicated it as a 'quiet do not disturb room'? No talking at all, and the only movement is entering/exiting. When people see you in there, it's a giant visible signal that you're probably not responding to Slack/email/etc because you're doing something and don't want to be disturbed.
> Given their cost economics, open layouts are probably not going anywhere in a world of rising office rents.
What does this have to do with rents? Cubicles can easily replace an open area and they count as tax deductions. Also this is like saying that it makes sense to give your developers cheaper, but lower performance PCs. While the lower upfront costs are obvious, your company will pay dearly in lost man hours... which makes no sense since silicon (or almost any other material) is still less expensive than carbon when it comes to the cost of time.
> That's not necessarily a bad thing, since spontaneous conversation encourages creativity. The real problem is signaling what state you're in.
Even when you signal your state e.g. headphones People in open offices still ignore it. Think about it. Would you not look at, smile, or wave to someone you know, who you just happen to be walking by? Is the supposed increase in creativity worth the major decrease in productivity when you have lunch and happy hour as options? I could be wrong but Github was born in an happy hour
> What if we took a huge glass conference room and dedicated it as a 'quiet do not disturb room'?
Yup. This kind of fixes it. Based on my experience with the 'fish bowl', a mini partition like what you see in libraries and schools would further help reduce distractions inside a conference room while still lowering the bar for obstacles to interaction.
> That's not necessarily a bad thing, since spontaneous conversation encourages creativity.
Sorry, but this just isn't true. Open office layouts are a bad thing. There are studies showing that they make people sick, unhappy, and less productive. People sometimes feel more creative and engaged, but on average they're not.
People also approach you way more in open office layouts, probably because of "in sight, in mind".
Little things that they usually wouldn't pester you for, it pops into their head and turns into a five minute conversation that completely obliterates any thread of concentration from before the interruption.
Also, I fully agree re: desk passing, it's so difficult to ignore this... particularly because if you _do_ manage to get in the zone and not notice the office traffic, there's inevitably somebody who comes to stand just a little behind you and to the side, hovering there waiting for your attention. It's startling when you notice them.
i am picturing an open office full of people wearing VR headsets and i am kind of freaking out a little, because that's either the best, or worst thing ever.
It just depends on the person - I spent a lot of years working on trading floors (open office, lots of noise, elbow to elbow with other developers) and you just learn to tune out the distractions and be productive regardless.
We have this crazy culture of instant responsiveness. Just like we cannot wait until thing compiles, we have IDE to tell us we didn't finish the sentence before we can even finish it. The same goes for our managers and customers. I am not convinced it is really more productive.
I think my ideal workweek (as a programmer) would be:
Monday: Do all the administrativia - email, meetings, status, planning for the week and so on. No real work done.
Tuesday-Thursday: Work on a single thing (or maybe two things if one becomes finished or blocked) without any external interruption (except maybe fire). During these 3 days, main work would be done.
Friday: Work on infrastructure, tools, configuration, cleaning things up, and similar stuff. Maybe prepare for next Monday.
Everything work related would be planned to go to the correct day (except emergencies).
It would be interesting if someone could try a similar setup (and share their experience).
The last place I worked at I had to take a lot of calls, mostly pointless, internally. I also got a huge amount of emails about things like the dishwasher not being emptied or the state of the kitchen in another office, and mixed in with that would be the occasional email from someone who would be very annoyed if I didn't reply, even to just acknowledge that I'd seen their email.
The current place at is a lot smaller and more chilled out and it seems to really make a difference. I don't have a phone because everyone I would talk to is in the same room with me, and I've received 6 emails so far this year for the same reason. Anything work related goes into chat so we can check back on it later, things that are more permanent go in jira/confluence, and that's that.
The amount extra work I get done is insane. I could probably do 2 hours at this job to every 8 at the last place.
Something else that wastes more time than you think: other people not being able to ping you when they have questions about the code you wrote, or how to do something you've done before.
That's the sort of problem that should, ideally, be fixed with regular scheduled communication and making sure there is plenty for people to work on. If I'm blocked on one task, there should be something else I can switch to until Alice is done with her meeting and can explain something.
A bit of organizational sociology: most people silently group their employees into two categories: people they pay to do things that they can't do (Type I) and people they pay to do things that they don't want to do (Type II). If you're Type I, you get a lot more respect than if you're Type II.
Managers who can't tell the difference between good and mediocre programmers lump them all together into Type II. Type II employees are evaluated based on their availability rather than their expertise or excellence. Contrary to stereotype, managers know that status pings cost a hell of a lot of time. That doesn't mean they're going to stop doing them. If someone is seen as a Type II employee, then it's seen as better to have that person available but running at 25% speed (you can always hire more people).
The issue isn't that managers are idiots who don't know that interruptions (especially the emotional kind, which status pings often become when a person is asked to justify time) waste time. They aren't idiots, and they do know that. The problem is that managers (and not just them, but everyone in the mainstream business culture) tend to correlate social status and competence at close to +1.0, so they assume that people who are getting hit with frequent interruptions aren't very good anyway.
> managers know that status pings cost a hell of a lot of time
BTW, I learned a good hard lesson about this. I had a long ongoing argument with one of my first managers that I could get 25% more work done if he'd just leave me alone until the end of the week, and that it was too much overhead and interruption for me to show my progress twice a day. I was working in CG films, and they wanted twice-daily renders of our shots.
I was wrong. Managers need status. Not twice a day for most code work, that's not normally reasonable, but on a basis more frequent than coders want to provide them ... it has to be before the work is done, not when they feel ready to present.
The reason is because everyone in a room can agree after an hour of talking in detail, on precisely what needs to happen, and then a week later find out that every single person in the room actually had a different idea.
It pays dividends to proactively provide the status managers need before they ask for it. Fend off the unexpected or interrupting status pings, and give them what they need.
It sounds like -for programmers- a good compromise might be agreeing with your manager that the last fifteen minutes of each work day will be spent on detailed status updates, and the first five will be spent on checking email to ensure that the hasn't been any miscommunication.
Re: silent grouping, that is my experience, it pays to be aware of it, and pays to aim for Type I.
But Re: assuming frequent interruption reflects negatively on performance, that is contrary to my own experience. I'm trying as hard as I can to rule myself out when I say this, but my friends and coworkers all suffer from more interruption the more knowledgable they get, and the more valuable they become to the company. This is one of the most damaging aspects of interruption culture IMO -- it often hurts the people most capable and willing to help the most.
>"all suffer from more interruption the more knowledgable they get, and the more valuable they become to the company. "
Well, in that case they're valuable for the knowledge they provide for their coworkers, rather than the work they produce. Being a bit in this situation, I'm leaning more and more into letting my boss know that this is something I need to do full-time, and simply not get any work done because of it. I think it's a huge boost to the team having someone knowledgeable to guide and mentor them.
However, I doubt it'd fly so well with the bean-counters.
I worked in an office where people were notorious for distracting others. I went out and bought a button, like the one from the Staples commercials that would play a recording of me screaming "BLOCKED" when I pressed it if someone would interrupt me. Interruptions ended shortly afterwards.
The answer to that is email, which is asynchronous. I.e. if someone is busy they are likely not answering their emails. So if they read their email, they are actively not working on anything, and will probably easily be able to tell you when you can interrupt them with the question. Or even answer it right there in the email response.
Yet people don't do it, because they want their answer now.
Sending an email asking "can I come over and talk to you" seems like sending a fax to ask if you can call. Shooting someone a quick IM seems like a better idea (or not, if they're set to away/busy/dnd.)
For developers, every meeting is a interruption. Every email a distraction. Yet 'nobody ever tells us nothing'.
I know there is a happy medium, but it seems the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction these days.