Interruptions are productivity and creativity killers. Middle managers are of questionable utility but that layer of an organization would be much more effective if it focused ruthlessly on removing distractions.<p>I worked at a small company where a significant portion of my effort went toward shielding my team from the distractions created by a CEO who couldn’t seem to help meddling in every aspect of the business. I think it’s because he started out doing, or at least being involved with, many of the functions of the company and had a hard time letting go as we grew. Even after the organization grew to 50+ people he couldn’t keep himself out of the nitty gritty details, but the format of the distraction changed over time. Instead of walking up to people and interrupting them in person (a double whammy according to this study, including both an “important” person and the in-person aspect), he would send what we called “Slack attacks” throughout the day. These were paragraphs-long Slack messages without any semblance of organization, punctuation, or line breaks. Fortunately, many of these messages were sent during the very early hours of the morning so they could be dealt with first thing in the AM, but that wasn’t always the case.<p>In the first phase I literally moved my team location and reorganized the desk arrangement so it was harder for him to get in and bug everyone. I had to “guard” the area and try to stop him from physically entering the space, which was always a strange dance. I couldn’t control his Slack messaging behavior so I worked with people to understand that while yes “the CEO is asking you for urgent work in Slack” seems like a valid reason to switch gears, but instead let me work to figure out what actually needs to be done and we’ll catch up later about what to do.<p>It was a weird dynamic but there was no doubt the distractions were a drag on performance. Every time he went on vacation we saw a marked increase in productivity, and more creative solutions seemed to come up as well. I don’t wish this type of environment on anyone but in a way I’m glad to have gone through it and learned some lessons about interruptions and how to avoid them.
40 or so years later, the book Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister remains the best quantitative study on environmental impacts on developer productivity.<p>The world has changed significantly since it was written, so you have to translate their measurements to modern contexts, but it's easier to translate real data on human behavior than to guess based on guesses.
Microsoft Teams is perhaps the worst communication software your company can have for Software Engineers. People usually don't use the half-baked threads capabilities because they're separate and not intuitive, so it's usually just endless chat messages, all at once. And so you get constant pinging all day. And then I need to mute my Teams chats, which is also risky because I could have gotten an important message.
We're also a picky bunch. A short coffee break or a chat with someone I like doesn't hurt as much as a "quick question" from Joe in Sales does.
I find taking mini breaks, whether visiting the restroom or being interrupted by my kids to be quite beneficial actually.<p>It gives my mind a few seconds or a minute or two to do background processing and potentially come up with a better way of doing something.<p>Or to realize that I’m not working on the most important thing in the first place.
There’s people that don’t have adhd that can handle notifications. That’s the thing with being impulsive - those disorders are mental illnesses (quite technically) and will limit your net worth. It’s like why do all developers need to be listening to the orchestra or radio while programming?