[HN Gopher] The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
___________________________________________________________________
The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
Author : 0x79de
Score : 89 points
Date : 2025-11-28 09:39 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (justoffbyone.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (justoffbyone.com)
| deepsun wrote:
| I remember Jeff Bezos said that something like promoting more
| communication/collaboration is wrong.
|
| And managers should focus on making people working independently.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| I'd love to see the original source for that one! Kind of
| ironic given RTO+bullpen approach we're seeing now.
| sfn42 wrote:
| I would say both are good, but collaboration should happen
| naturally. You cant force it. If I want help I'll ask for help,
| if I want to brainstorm I'll ask a colleague to brainstorm.
|
| Most of the time I just want people to leave me alone so I can
| get stuff done.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Silos are so much worse though. Open
| communication/collaboration is great but needs to be rate
| limited to enable focused work.
| jerome-jh wrote:
| When I started working, more than 25 years ago, we had one team
| meeting per week (1 hour), very few other meetings. Cellphones
| were getting mainstream and people had these funny ringtones, but
| since communications were expensive, phones were not ringing
| often. The office phone was ringing even more seldomly. We had no
| ticketing system. Managers just trusted you for doing your work.
| When going to someone else desk we would start with "may I
| disturb you?", and the answer may have been "give me five
| minutes". We had like 2-3 emails a day. It turns out someone had
| the radio in the office. That was in Belgium and the radio was in
| Flemish. This was not a big deal since I do not understand
| Flemish. Despite being rather cramped, I remember this office as
| quiet. It was not a large open-space though.
|
| I cannot remember the turning point. Of course "agile" did a lot
| of damage, then ticketing systems, the illusion that developers
| are swap-able, and now constant notification stream.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Pretty similar to my first couple of jobs. We didn't even have
| email. To document when something was done, we printed a diff
| and wrote a memo, which went into a file (i.e. a folder in a
| drawer) for that project.
| everdrive wrote:
| >but since communications were expensive, phones were not
| ringing often.
|
| This is a very important point, and it's crucial for people to
| understand that merely making something more available can have
| an outsized effect.
| jsight wrote:
| TBH, I think covid and the push towards Zoom and others had a
| similar outsized effect. It made synchronous meetings nearly
| "free" for many more people.
| Frieren wrote:
| > When I started working, more than 25 years ago, we had one
| team meeting per week (1 hour), very few other meetings.
|
| When I worked 25 years ago, I had the same experience. But
| software was way simpler than today. The scale and complexity
| of current software requires a level of organization and
| communication that was not needed with simpler needs.
|
| Most software run on a PC with probably no internet connection.
| Updating the software required to send discs by mail.
| Everything was slower, and probably more robust. Maybe banking
| was closer to what we have now, but it was still slower and
| there were way less transactions.
|
| In contrast, my last 3 jobs required backend services available
| 24/7 to serve millions of users worldwide. We had many data
| providers, and we provided services to dozens of big
| corporations. We had teams dedicated to just integrate to all
| the partners, wallets, data providers, etc.
|
| Increased complexity requires more communication and more
| meetings, and more time dedicated to synch all that
| development. If anyone wants old-style ways of working, with
| more time coding and less meetings I would recommend to go to
| small companies with limited reach. Their problems are going to
| be easier managed by a few developers that can focus on
| creating new things instead of getting up to date with all the
| complexity that a big corporation requires.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| 25 years ago internet was as good as everywhere at work and
| schools in the civilized world and was starting to ramp up in
| homes. CDs or DVDs were indeed still used for large sets of
| software and documentation, like stacks of MSDN discs. We
| even had distibuted source code version control, though it
| was often only synchronized accross the ocean (e.g. using
| SERI) overnight.
|
| Personally i like the fact that there are interruptions at
| work. Working is often a social business and activities like
| rubber ducking, whiteboarding or live code explanation with
| living people works wonders for me. It should happen even
| more.
|
| The people who were coding 8 hours a day, very often were
| writing yet another framework that they personally came up
| with to solve a problem, but without duscussing its
| requirements. More often than not they were making the wrong
| thing, making too clever things or over engineering.
| dav_Oz wrote:
| While at some point in the optimization game Goodhart's Law will
| also apply here, before that happens I thoroughly enjoyed the
| insights from reading it and will try implementing some version
| of it to gauge my productivity before jumping to another metric
| always aware of the abyss, the ultimate procrastination: being
| unproductive by trying too hard to optimize productivity.
|
| Unproductivity is the little death that brings total
| obliteration. I will face my unproductivity. I will let it pass
| through me. When it is gone, only action will remain.
|
| Jump!
| cancan wrote:
| Definitely agree with your assessment. That's the feeling I
| wanted to convey at the end. The goal is to make people aware
| it's not their fault but they have some things they can try to
| make things better for them.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> While at some point in the optimization game Goodhart's Law
| will also apply here...
|
| The tools for surveilling and enforcing "collaboration" can
| probably be reprogrammed to measure "flow."
| behnamoh wrote:
| that's too many words to just say "try to manage your time
| better".
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| How many people have control over how their time is managed at
| the office?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Great management will do that automatically. Meetings will be
| sent so the team has 3-4 uninterrupted, solid working days
| with one day strictly dedicated to meetings and/or other
| interruptions.
| cancan wrote:
| I am the author of this piece. It was something I put together as
| a curiosity and wanted to play with Astro. Hope you all enjoyed
| it!
| captainkrtek wrote:
| This is excellent and aligns with my own experience.
|
| During my day I try to minimize interruptions by batching them.
| I will largely ignore Slack, and as notifications come in I
| glance and determine quickly if it really is urgent or if it
| can wait. If it can wait, I will punt all of those messages to
| a "remind me later" of a few hours, and get back to my task. I
| think this keeps my "recovery time" small as I'm not looking
| too close at these messages. It's not perfect, but definitely
| helps over pausing my "real work" to fully dive into each
| notification or ask.
| skirmish wrote:
| Then in your next performance review you get dinged as "not
| responsive", "not a team player". Trying to work in peace is
| a in instant loss nowadays, just play the visibility
| performative game as all the quickly promoted people in
| office do. Why do you think your management cares about
| getting things done? If they did they would reward it.
| OnionBlender wrote:
| What is Astro? What did you use to make those graphs?
| cancan wrote:
| Astro is a JS framework for building websites. It's dynamic
| enough for my needs but generates static sites.
|
| I've built a custom visualization tool for the graphics.
| moltar wrote:
| Thank you. Seminal work! I'm already thinking how I will change
| my day and my teams approach to work.
| Noe2097 wrote:
| Another take on the matter is: interruptions are inevitable, so
| reducing the "recovery penalty" is key, and can be learned.
|
| That's something that you learn to do when you have a kid:
| suddenly, your periods of 4 hours of focus free time (for coding,
| exploring tech, whatever) during the weekend just _disappear_.
| You only get max 30 minutes of free time in a day; this is
| extremely frustrating initially; there is no boss to complain to,
| no meetings to blame, no solution but to deal with it.
| Progressively, you learn to switch tasks much more efficiently,
| by making regular check points, so that you can get interrupted
| any time and get back to deep work _quickly_.
| cancan wrote:
| Yeah this is something I want to learn more about for sure and
| is the weakest part of this piece. What have you found that
| works for you? Or is just that knowing that you'll get
| interrupted will force better discipline?
| sethammons wrote:
| this is part of the promise of the Pomodoro Technique. Named
| after a tomato shaped kitchen timer, the idea is to work for
| 25 minutes and then stop for 5 and step away from what you
| were doing, rinse and repeat. Being able to pick back up
| becomes important.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| I really like the reframe of controlling
| notifications/interruptions to minimizing "surprises". Because
| inside surprises fit not only notifications, but taskswitching,
| shifting todo lists, head/body movement and even music choices.
| The effect on the brain is similar for all cases.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| If you're suffering from interruptions like this and not
| practicing some form of Dzogchen or Mahamudra, you're really
| doing yourself a disservice. Being able to alternate between
| awareness and non-awareness is a staple of these forms of
| meditation, and like all skills can be learned over time.
| CollinEMac wrote:
| This is my first time ever even seeing these words. Any
| recommendations on how to get started?
| mistersquid wrote:
| I found it odd that breaks (e.g. lunch) were not part of the mix.
| OnionBlender wrote:
| The model assumes the day begins with focus time. My day always
| starts with me recovering from the stress of my commute.
| antonymoose wrote:
| For me, it's not a matter of interruption. I'm largely free to
| dictate my own remote asynchronous schedule and have been for
| many years.
|
| For me, it's a nebulous poorly managed product shop with an
| "everyone owns everything" mentality which in reality means no
| one owns anything. With 10 engineers and 60 microservrices and
| GitHub repositories, this makes for an unmanageable, unknowable
| project.
|
| For me, at least, the lack of the ability to compartmentalize
| decisions across a knowable domain is the crippling factor in
| concentration and productivity.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-28 23:01 UTC)