[HN Gopher] Focus vs Coordination
___________________________________________________________________
Focus vs Coordination
Author : 1penny42cents
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-06-26 09:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (camhashemi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (camhashemi.com)
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| I'm not sure if these are opposite ends of the spectrum.
|
| I think the article says it best, focus results in actions. But
| coordinating, is an action in itself. The act of attending an all
| hands meeting, or even meeting with a group of people requires
| focus(e.g. to be fully present in a meeting). Or to prepare for
| an all-hands meeting a manager has to focus and think of an
| agenda.
|
| I feel like focus is a supporting act for almost everything and
| we have a problem with balancing among too many things.
| 1penny42cents wrote:
| Focus (as I tried to define it) is not just "paying attention",
| but more like "a flow state that moves things forward".
|
| The problem is that coordinating forces us to break from that
| flow state in order to spread, organize, and mediate
| information across teammates. We can either pay attention to
| solving problems, or to communicating/informing/negotiating
| with people, but not both. The manager needs to shut off Slack
| in order to prep for the meeting, for example.
|
| But you're right. Focus is required to coordinate properly and
| coordination is required to focus properly. It's an intricate
| dance. The tricky part is moving between the two states in a
| harmonious way.
| codingdave wrote:
| There are some interesting analogies and truths here, but also
| dogmatic statements about focus and coordination being mutually
| incompatible. I tend to think that there is no conflict between
| those two - focus is always possible. However, as you move to
| higher levels of abstraction, you share your focus with more
| people to architect a solution, then you all split off to go down
| to the detailed abstraction levels for individual tasks/work.
|
| One of my former co-workers used to be adamant that what makes a
| good developer is someone who is comfortable sliding up and down
| abstraction layers. It resolves so many problems, and lets you
| aim your focus where it is needed most.
| afarrell wrote:
| I've found one good way to manage this tension is doing
| coordination by "pair programming" on a shared markdown file in a
| collaborative text editor. Dropbox paper is good for this.
| pogorniy wrote:
| It showed me perspective I did not see before. Nice article.
| amirkdv wrote:
| This is a really good description of a natural tension any
| engineering team has to deal with. I specially liked the framing
| of pair programming as a powerful hybrid.
|
| A challenge the OP doesn't touch on is the need for individual
| focus _during_ coordination events. For example, someone is
| presenting their design ideas to an audience who's seeing them
| for the first time. In order for the coordination to be
| productive, the audience needs to be good at focusing in realtime
| to grok the ideas presented to them. It'd be unfortunate to rely
| on your team's ability to pull off a burst of focus on demand.
| Some can do this well, some can't, and you only water down your
| coordination if you rely on it too much.
|
| I've read about and quite like writing-heavy workflows, e.g.
| presenter writes and shares a 4-6 pager, or meeting starts with
| people silently reading a memo. The async-ness and the reliance
| on written word pulls a lot of weight when there's too much
| depth/breadth involved; the kind of thing that happens a handful
| of times a quarter.
|
| But this is hard to pull off consistently every week for small
| iterations that nonetheless need coordination on cognitively
| demanding topics.
|
| How do folks deal with this?
| 1penny42cents wrote:
| There's a strong relationship between writing and focus. The
| more writing done beforehand, the more productive a meeting can
| be.
|
| But writing is harder to coordinate over. Just think of all
| those multi-day hundred-message chat arguments that happen from
| time to time. Going completely async means things fall through
| the cracks by default, so we need to write more and more to
| compensate. But meetings are great for synchronizing
| information and coming to decisions quickly. Meetings have high
| information bandwidth and we're much more adapted to face to
| face conversation than back and forth writing.
|
| So on top of the Focus-Coordination spectrum, there's the Sync-
| Async spectrum, where focus and async are on one side, and
| coordination and synchronous communication are on the other. We
| can use sync and asynchronous communication to achieve that
| balance between focus and coordination across time.
| tooltower wrote:
| I'm one of those folks who can't focus on my own thoughts
| during a presentation. I can understand the ideas being
| presented, but cannot critically evaluate them until later.
|
| All I can muster is to write down questions. It's just a
| bulleted list of "Slide number/title. Question." I can ask them
| in real time if the presenter consents to interruptions.
| Otherwise, I'll ponder over them later when I can focus, and
| follow up if necessary.
|
| I pretty much never approve any decision in a presentation
| without later analysis. That is, unless there is somebody else
| in the room that I can delegate that analysis to post-approval.
| sideproject wrote:
| Nicely captured and well thought out. As an engineering manager
| with 30 engineers in a 120-people company working on a social
| marketplace, our company requires an extraordinary amount of
| coordination, while engineers also need to focus.
|
| I do feel like the post speaks quite a bit about extremes -
| focus, coordination, perfect, unproductive etc etc, while most of
| the teams sit somewhere in between trying to find that balance
| the author is referring to.
|
| Also, the position of where they are changes on a daily basis
| depending on what work is being done and who is joining and who
| is leaving.
|
| Wearing my engineer hat on, I'd love to, just get the
| requirements and tell everyone to go away while I focus on my
| work, but I also understand the whole coordination part. It's
| absolutely critical to making the team efficient & productive,
| which often go unnoticed and unappreciated.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-06-27 23:00 UTC)