Almost 2 decades ago I figured out that, from the very start in a new job, you have to train others to not expect constant availability and immediate response from you.
Things like “work phone and work e-mail are only for work hours” and only checking e-mails once in a while rather than being a slave-to-notifications interrupting anything I might be doing to check any e-mail coming in and replying to it (if you know the psychology of effective working, externally driven frequent interruptions is one of the most unproductive ways to work and is needlessly stressful).
It’s pretty hard getting away with changing this later after people have already baked in expectations about your “availability” (personally, I never succeeded in that), but it works if you’re doing this kind of “flow control” up front and reliably do eventually get around to look into and addressing whatever people sent you - in fact you’re likely more reliable than those providing “immediate availability” because it’s a lot easier to have things under control and naturally prioritise by importance, so important stuff won’t just “fall to the bottom of the pile” because a bunch of fresh requests came in distracting you away from the more important stuff and you forgot about it.
There are other, more indirect upsides, such as “shit they can solve themselves” from other people seldom getting to you because they know you won’t immediatelly drop everything to solve any problem of theirs, so won’t just mail you and sit on their arses waiting and instead have a go or two at it themselves and “self-solving problems” (the kind of stuff that turns out not to be a problem but instead a misinterpretation or are caused by temporary conditions elsewhere and out of your control) solving themselves before you get around to looking into them,
That said, I do have a hierarchy of access, with e-mails being treated as less urgent and phone calls as more urgent, though even in the latter I’ll consistently (consistency is important in managing other people’s expectations) push back - i.e. “send me an e-mail and I’ll look into it when I have availability” - if somebody calls me with stuff that’s not important and urgent enough to justify using that “channel”.
All this to say that for me what’s in this post just looks like a more advanced version of what I do for time management, productivity and stress control.
Well, that’s the thing: in customer facing (even if it’s an internal “customer”) occupations there’s usually no other choice but be driven by external timings, but if you’re doing software development or any other kind of thinking/creation work, frequent interruptions just break your concentration, pull you out of Flow (the psychological state of maximum productivity), force you to mentally switch tracks (a form of overhead cost) and often make you lose track of what you’re doing, not to mention being a source of unecessary stress.
Unfortunatelly, whilst some are good, plenty of Engineering environments and managers are pretty bad when it comes to recognizing the costs of frequent interruptions and supporting a maximum productivity environment, from the systemic corporate-wide problem which is “open space” work areas to managers who themselves are overstressed firefighters with poor time, impulse and prioritization control, the kind of reactive unstructured behaviour that ends up disrupting everybody else’s work flow.
I have such passionate hate for open space work environments. Even the proported benefits are bullshit. It doesn’t improve communication, I still have to get up and talk to the person across from me. Between me being an engineer and needing to think when I’m at my desk to my coworker who has frequent phone calls to my coworker who likes to eat his pungent lunches at his desk (he routinely eats horseradish there and takes a different lunch time than I do), my desk can be rendered unusable for focused work on a regular basis. An office would just solve that issue and a cubicle would greatly improve it.
Also it’s awkward doing creative work out in the open. I prefer closed spaces for it
Almost 2 decades ago I figured out that, from the very start in a new job, you have to train others to not expect constant availability and immediate response from you.
Things like “work phone and work e-mail are only for work hours” and only checking e-mails once in a while rather than being a slave-to-notifications interrupting anything I might be doing to check any e-mail coming in and replying to it (if you know the psychology of effective working, externally driven frequent interruptions is one of the most unproductive ways to work and is needlessly stressful).
It’s pretty hard getting away with changing this later after people have already baked in expectations about your “availability” (personally, I never succeeded in that), but it works if you’re doing this kind of “flow control” up front and reliably do eventually get around to look into and addressing whatever people sent you - in fact you’re likely more reliable than those providing “immediate availability” because it’s a lot easier to have things under control and naturally prioritise by importance, so important stuff won’t just “fall to the bottom of the pile” because a bunch of fresh requests came in distracting you away from the more important stuff and you forgot about it.
There are other, more indirect upsides, such as “shit they can solve themselves” from other people seldom getting to you because they know you won’t immediatelly drop everything to solve any problem of theirs, so won’t just mail you and sit on their arses waiting and instead have a go or two at it themselves and “self-solving problems” (the kind of stuff that turns out not to be a problem but instead a misinterpretation or are caused by temporary conditions elsewhere and out of your control) solving themselves before you get around to looking into them,
That said, I do have a hierarchy of access, with e-mails being treated as less urgent and phone calls as more urgent, though even in the latter I’ll consistently (consistency is important in managing other people’s expectations) push back - i.e. “send me an e-mail and I’ll look into it when I have availability” - if somebody calls me with stuff that’s not important and urgent enough to justify using that “channel”.
All this to say that for me what’s in this post just looks like a more advanced version of what I do for time management, productivity and stress control.
I learned this when I got into Tech Support and switched to an engineer.
TechSupport. I was on tickets all the time so if you ping me on teams I’d ping back immediately if I was free or within 2 min if I was on a call.
Engineer? Nope. Might get a ping back before lunch if you’re lucky. I prefer not to break my concentration scripting. It fucks upy flow.
Well, that’s the thing: in customer facing (even if it’s an internal “customer”) occupations there’s usually no other choice but be driven by external timings, but if you’re doing software development or any other kind of thinking/creation work, frequent interruptions just break your concentration, pull you out of Flow (the psychological state of maximum productivity), force you to mentally switch tracks (a form of overhead cost) and often make you lose track of what you’re doing, not to mention being a source of unecessary stress.
Unfortunatelly, whilst some are good, plenty of Engineering environments and managers are pretty bad when it comes to recognizing the costs of frequent interruptions and supporting a maximum productivity environment, from the systemic corporate-wide problem which is “open space” work areas to managers who themselves are overstressed firefighters with poor time, impulse and prioritization control, the kind of reactive unstructured behaviour that ends up disrupting everybody else’s work flow.
I have such passionate hate for open space work environments. Even the proported benefits are bullshit. It doesn’t improve communication, I still have to get up and talk to the person across from me. Between me being an engineer and needing to think when I’m at my desk to my coworker who has frequent phone calls to my coworker who likes to eat his pungent lunches at his desk (he routinely eats horseradish there and takes a different lunch time than I do), my desk can be rendered unusable for focused work on a regular basis. An office would just solve that issue and a cubicle would greatly improve it.
Also it’s awkward doing creative work out in the open. I prefer closed spaces for it