Turn off notifications, silence your phone. Turn on some music you enjoy and blast it out. The most important thing is to recognize that you don't need notifications. You don't need to respond immediately... Just get back to them when you can.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Programming
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This right here. My main focus is on doing the work, not replying to antsy POs and colleagues looking for answers in trivial issues. I’ll get back to them later.
As others have pointed out already: turn off notifications.
How I do it when I have to be productive and have a deadline hanging over my head:
- Put on my headphones (my office is a free seating open office space)
- Make sure all notifications are turned off
- Open a fresh page in my OneNote (more about this further down)
- Set a time where I'm exiting developer mode to check my email, get done more coffee, be social etc etc
The OneNote is for all ideas that pop up that's not about the task at hand. I quickly note it down and jump right back to what I was doing. "Do I have to buy milk on my way home? Have to ask wife... Noted!"..."Was the doctors appointment first thing tomorrow? Need to check. Noted!"
Footnote: It's weird how we got used to always being on high alert nowadays. In the old days, getting a response via mail took days. If you called someone and they didn't answer you'd just get on with your day and call later.
This really helps. Thank you.
Another thing...If you are seated in an open office environment or have free seating it's really good if you can get some sort of agreement with your colleagues that if a someone has headphones on they should not approach and instead act as if the person wasn't there at all. They should send an email or a Teams message instead.
The single most common thing that rips me out of my creative world is people talking my shoulder asking me if I'm busy..... aaaaand then it often takes me 20 minutes to get up to speed again.
If possible, set everything on silent. This of course is by assumption that you are allowed to do that. If, however, your company requires you to keep the notifications on, and reply as fast as possible, I'd present the issue of constant titifications in general being an issue to everybody (everyone will need to unadjust, and readjust, to their work when they look up the source of the notification). I'd fathom one could be able to set e-mail to notify you only if the mail is set as important, and the company suggested to punish the missuse of important -tag.
Alternatively, you can declare that if something needs specificly your attention, to use communication method x, and have everything else muted, and checked manually whenever you need to take your eyes off the code. That won't eliminate the problem, but will hopefully reduce it. If the higer ups have an issue with this, tell them the repeated interuptions cost money.
Disable notifications for messages, emails, and meetings when you need to focus.
Coding is both highly creative and technical, and requires a great deal of working memory. Some find the "flow state" to be most productive, and this requires uninterrupted focus. Arrange your day around your tasks rather than trying to cram a few seconds of time "in the zone" between meetings; instead, decline or reschedule the meetings, put on some music - and turn off those notifications.
Most people will tell you to mute everything and they will not be wrong. HOWEVER managing your focus is a skill that might help you immensely and since you are motivated to work on, it I'd say give it a shot :)
For example, we often embark on long chains of thought, trying to understand some complex behavior. These greatly exceed our working memory, you can think of them as living in our brains' volatile memory and will completely vanish once we are interrupted. In a sense, during this type of reasoning, we have been running heuristics but haven't thought of anything "solid" yet.
You can try approaching problems in a way that could help you regain focus fast. For instance, trying to break down your reasoning in small logical chunks, or trying to extract intermediate conclusions as you process the problem. This can not only help you with your focus but also improve your problem solving skills in general, as you will be working in a more structured framework.
Wow! I wish I can do it. But I'm struggling to.
Wow! I wish I can do it. But I'm struggling to.