It’s 10:00 a.m. You have a task ahead of you that you estimate will take two hours to do properly and finish. You settle into your work environment and start writing code. Little by little, your mind lets go of the digressions from the earlier coffee break and gets fully absorbed in the problem at hand. It’s not unusual to enter the state of flow described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his famous book on positive psychology.
Making design decisions, developing a class, or refactoring a set of tests, for example, requires concentration and a certain peace of mind if we are to make the right choices.
This seems obvious, but few workplaces foster this calm and ability to concentrate.
I once read that when we are completely absorbed in a state of flow and get interrupted, it takes at least twenty minutes to return to a similar level of concentration. Over several weeks, that adds up to many hours of lost work—it’s as simple and as overwhelming as that.
There are countless moments when we are interrupted and forcibly pulled out of that state of flow.
There are what I call time vampires: people, even good friends, who feel entitled to come over to your desk and suddenly ask you whatever they need at that moment, or those who think their time is more valuable than yours.
Clients who have been conditioned to call because it’s more convenient than describing a problem in an email.
Spontaneous, unplanned meetings because your boss or manager has become anxious or thinks something is urgent, and now tries to pass that anxiety on to the team because of a lack of basic organization. I call this anxious boss syndrome (and it is a real affliction, because it spreads that state of mind to the rest of the team).
Open-plan spaces where ringing phones and the murmur of conversations are constant—even that woman whose beautiful high heels leave a symphony of footsteps that identify her (and irritate you).
One ordinary day a couple of years ago, I decided to count how many times I was interrupted and disturbed during the workday: I counted fourteen times, including some fifteen emails irrelevant to my work and responsibilities.
The worst part is that most of these interruptions happen because someone needs something from you, and what they need has nothing to do with your work. We don’t realize that they are taking away precisely the time and peace of mind we need to do quality work and avoid bugs that will come back to haunt us later.
A professional developer avoids these countless, useless interruptions. Here are some suggestions that have worked particularly well for me:
- Identify the time vampires: when they persist, politely fend them off by showing as little interest as possible in their requests. Eventually, they will stop coming to you.
- If your boss, coordinator, or manager gets into the habit of holding unplanned meetings, tell them clearly. They may not realize the impact this has on the work. I can recall one commercially minded person who used meetings to do their work directly in a spreadsheet…
- If clients keep pestering you by phone, politely ask them to submit requests by email or through whatever ticketing system you use. In time, they will thank you, because nothing helps you understand a problem fully like describing it.
Since I started applying these simple techniques, both for myself and for the team I was leading at the time, we created a much better working environment and were therefore able to produce higher-quality work. I also gained a few acquaintances who started to see me in a somewhat less favorable light, but my boss soon noticed the change and the improvement in the team’s productivity.
“I’m not saying we have to work in a cloistered monastery. We just need to use common sense in these situations and recognize that there are unacceptable limits to the number of daily interruptions—a sign of a general lack of organization and productivity at work.”