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Shelah Horvitz's avatar

Terrific article.

I used to be a software engineer, for 25 years. Over the course of my career, not only did we have to deal with constant email interruptions, but towards the end, everything moved to open offices and we were expected to check Slack every couple of minutes, and people were always talking, constantly conversations going on around me. Which meant I spent my entire day saying, "Now where was I?" I wore a shooter's headset to try to block out the noise so I could concentrate but it only brought it down to a dull roar. In my last job, when they moved to an open office, I begged my boss to leave *some* place where I could go for quiet so I could actually concentrate but no, the theory was that having no barrier between the guy who's shouting across the room three feet away from you increases productivity. I had to work from home to get anything done but this was pre-COVID and I eventually got sacked for working from home.

I'm now a full-time painter, and my studio is a barn with no internet. I spend the mornings in the house where I have internet, not the studio, looking at other people's work, puttering, basically letting my head come up with a strategy for the part of the painting I have to work on for the day. And then I go to the studio and execute the strategy. And then get the hell out because I'm impetuous and I need to have thought out what I'm going to do next and tested it in my head a few times until I'm sure it's right. I consider all that puttering time, all that time away from the studio, to be *also* time that I'm painting, because getting ideas and testing them in my head is part of the process. It's what you do when you have no Undo button, when you're working in a medium without configuration management, where you can't go back to a previous version, when what you do has to be right. Having no internet where I actually paint means I have control over my concentration when it really counts. Working with my own rhythms, I've made enormous strides in the past few years, improved by leagues.

When you tell management what you need in order to be productive, they simply don't listen. They have theory. Theory is very much informed by assumptions developed around extroverts. Theory is lethal to concentration for people who need quiet and alone time to be productive.

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Josh Brake's avatar

This post reminds me of an example I tell my students each year in my electrical engineering classes where we talk about how a computer processor works. Every time you want to make a change in the program you’re running on the processor you need to store the current state of all the registers of the processor (known as the context) in memory before you jump. This process, called context switching, is a big problem in processor design because it is inefficient to do all this extra work to jump around to a different part of the code.

There are a lot of analogies comparing the human brain to a computer processor that don’t work, but this one sure does. The work done by Gloria and others demonstrates that our brain is like a single core processor. Unfortunately, this doesn’t bode well for us in our distracted age where we are endlessly tempted to switch contexts to check our email or reply to a text.

I’m sure you’ve engaged with Cal Newport on this stuff as well, but I’m really looking forward to his current work and upcoming book on his conception of “Slow Productivity” which helps to address some of these themes.

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