Any hints on how to implement "deep work" in a team?
I heard about the book "Deep Work" by Cal Newport recently. The concepts are really interesting. I experience problems with focused work time at my job as well.
I tried to implement the ideas in the book by turning off notifications, emails and so on during a time when I want to focus. But still, people are approaching me directly because they don't know when I don't want to be disturbed or don't know about the concept.
My question: Has anyone implemented deep work in their team? Meaning that you have some time where you are not distracted and can fully focus on some task. How did you do it?
In my last team, our rules for this were:
Following the above rules caused us to lose clients/projects/etc, because it delayed our response time while we were still getting the knowledgebase/CRM up to speed. But it was worth it, because we were actually able to do our work, and our business ended up growing quite well as a result, despite the early pain of transitioning into this mode.
Thanks Rob. That's some strict rules :-). I'm working as a freelancer. Not sure if I can implement that kind of ruleset.
But true, collecting the team's knowledge is very important. In my case, some knowledge is concentrated on me and people are approaching me because of that. I just wrote a big chunk of documentation so let's see if that helps.
How much effort was it for your team to create the knowledgebase and maintain it now?
Btw: I really enjoyed your talks about mom-test and your book is on my read list :-)
And regarding the strictness, yeah.. Probably overkill for lots of pursuits, but our business was based around creative work, and it was super easy to let day-to-day interruptions and admin eat away all the good creative hours. So we put this stuff in place so that everyone had at least 4 hours of undisturbed work in the mornings, to work on what mattered most. And as a happy side-effect, it also made it really easy to handle someone being unavailable due to sickness/travel, which was a super big perk and removed a lot of the stress about someone being away.
There was some friction for the first couple months, since people kept needing stuff that was "trapped" in someone else's head. So we used those questions as our "trigger" to write the documentation.
Once we were over that (stressful and difficult) transition, maintaining it was pretty easy, and we just made it part of our process for starting new products/projects/clients. Each project got a dropbox folder, and there was always a "readme" in each which detailed everything that mattered and had happened for that project. It was meant to be enough that if the person leading the project got hit by a bus, anyone else could pick it up and keep it going without any problems or confusion (for either us or any partners/clients).
The project readmes handled most day-to-day questions, and other random stuff got sorted out in the weekly meeting (which sometimes led to the creation of new documents, but not always, since thousands of pages of documentation is just as useless as having none).
I quit my job and moved 50 miles out of town, which made it much easier to focus :)
👏👍😂
Roman, I noticed you are into trading etc, have you built any trading algos?
Mostly data pipelines so far. Algos are work in progress, low frequency ones. Algos take a lot of studying, testing, verification and "deep working". 😀
Low frequency is what interests me. Do you day trade, swing trade etc?
Swing Trade Options on demo account and Intraday FX on demo. Everything is in the early stages of testing and development so nothing to boast about. ;)
That's a good one. Hope I don't have to do the same :-)
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
Are you in an office, then?
For emails, have you set up autoresponders?
When people directly talk to you (I'm guessing they walk right to your desk), what is it about? Is it urgent? Can you close the door to your office? Do you have underlying rules around getting Deep Work done in the office? Core hours?
Putting on headphones where I work means "Do Not Disturb". DND mode on Discord means I'll ignore you until later. Autoreplies on email work too.
Also, working from home (or out of the office) is a great way, because then there is no real direct way for them to interrupt you.
Thanks for your detailed answer. Yes, I'm working in an open plan office together with around 30 people. I often have headphones on all the time because it's just too noisy.
When people approach me it's mostly not really urgent. Sometimes someone has a question by which he/she feels blocked. Sometimes it's not even that urgent.
We don't have any ruleset for deep work for now. It should probably be the starting point to discuss with the team how we want to signal to each other that somebody doesn't want to be disturbed.
Yeah, I'd suggest at your standup or weekly retro, or whatever you do, that you bring it up. If you're feeling this way about lack of ability to focus, then surely other people are too.
I'd also bring up the point about blockers and urgency. At our place, someone may be blocked on something and they'll ping about it. But they have other work they can do in the meantime, so it's even if blocked, it can normally wait. Only exceptional thing is urgent bugfixes / downtime, but those are rare.
This is something we've raised at work recently. We're still working it out, but some things that have helped:
More personally:
“Signal when you're in deep work. For now, this means headphones, but I like the idea of having something physical that you could flip over on your desk to visually show you don't want to be interrupted.”
Interesting...
Small signs? Small signs plus timers ⏱
Interrupt me in 25, 30, 45 mins. Good habit builders too... 🥳 lots of possibilities here.
An opportunity perhaps?💰
Setup a shoplify store with variations, digital, analog, with “personalities” such as, Star Wars, Dr who etc. Have them made in China and shipped direct to purchaser. 🙃
Haha I thought about making something. Thought it would be cool to link it to Slack/Basecamp etc to turn off notifications too.
I guess we are wired differently cause I was always welcome to my co-workers finding me and asking for help. I was able to return to my programming no problem.
Sure different people work in different ways. I was OK with that for a long time until I read about how our brain is not made for multitasking and so on. I started observing myself and saw the same issues when I'm working.
I straight up told my employer "I will be working from home". At first they tried to wrangle me back in the office a few days out of the week, but I stood my ground.
Now before I did that, I spent a good three months working out of the office, but soon realized I couldn't get anything with the constant interruptions. I think the key was that I displayed my value up front, and then firmly stood my ground when asking to work from home.
Just be clear with your reasoning and they should understand.
Not bad standing your ground like this. I actually like working in the office for the most part. For me working remotely just brings a different set of problems like feeling disconnected. But if it works for you that's great.
Thanks for the link. I will check it out
At Wildbit, we're big believers. So much so that every new employee gets a copy of Deep Work. For the last few months, I've been reading a ton of books and research papers about focus, how to get in the zone, how to stay there, and much more. The goal has been to write a book about tactics and insights to help developers establish and maintain focus.
There's quite a few layers to it, and it's a significant cultural investment that everyone has to understand and appreciate. It sounds like that's the main challenge in your case, and there's no magical way to do it other than educating your team. At Wildbit, we try to really embrace email and build a culture that avoids direct interruptions. By pushing more communication to email or asynchronous channels, it enables the recipient to process it when they have time rather than being interrupted in the middle of something important.
The book is still in progress (and will be free when it's finished), but there's a slide deck there that covers a lot of the research and main points to consider to enable more focus and time for deep work. It goes far beyond just the team/social aspects, though. It touches on nutrition, brain function, exercise/movement, meetings, reducing our dependence on chat, reducing errors, etc. There's certainly some overlap with concepts in Deep Work, but it really dives into how it all relates to work as a software developer.
Thanks for your detailed insights. I agree, educating the team will be the first step. And great to see you're writing a book about this. Just subscribed to your newsletter :-)
How clear is your understanding of how your workday should look like once you will achieve "deep work"?
Not too clear I guess. My main goals would be to have a couple of hours each day to get work done efficiently. Especially in times when I have more challenging tasks to do. I'd like to reduce my working hours and yet achieving similar results as well.
As for me, if you phrase your goal like that (having a couple of uninterrupted hours rather that implementing 'deep work'), it would be much easier to achieve that.
It would be also good to specify how many hours do you really want.
Thanks for your reply. The last point is a good one. In some situations, it's necessary to speak to a specific person, of course. But to help with every trivial problem isn't beneficial for oneself in the long term
Headphones work great, but some other things I've tried:
Thanks for your suggestions. I like the idea of a no-meeting day. Forest and twist sound interesting I'll check them out.
I think just getting rid of Slack or Hipchat is a bit problematic though since it's often the way how teams communicate. Especially if remotes are involved it's kind of necessary to use them I think.
https://twitter.com/channingallen/status/1075065183825993728?s=21
Thanks, Channing for your insights. I actually don't have so many problems to focus when I'm alone. Do you have any hints on how to do this in a team context?
I just released a product to help teams limit distractions: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/our-time-to-think
Currently, it only sets Slacks' DND setting for the team. In the future though, I plan to set desktop and phone DND status and integrate with a physical light so that people walking by can see the team is in a focus-session. Let me know what you think! Thanks.
I think you hit the nail on the head in your response to @davidwparker. It's just a matter of communicating your intentions and setting expectations.