Email - the curse of productivity
It has been quite some time since I have posted. Part of that is due to personal distractions (getting my garden planted and my sailboat ready for the upcoming season), and part of that is being 'in the zone' working on some special projects at work. DeMarco and Lister began talking about being "in the zone" in their famous book Peopleware written in 1987. (In my opinion, this is a must read for anyone in the software business, especially for managers who should reread it yearly.) The Croatian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi also discusses a similar concept he calls "flow," and identifies 9 characteristics of 'flow.'
Being in the "zone" for me is a myopic mental state where we are so focused on completing a task the world whizzes by and time becomes irrelevant. For many it is sort of a magical place; a momentary escape from reality. For example, when I sit down to write code in the evening the time passes so quickly that I soon discover it is 1 am in the morning. But, I want to complete one more class, and before I realize it is 4 am. (I am a slow coder.) People who are addicted to computer games know all too well about the 'zone.'
This past month I had to come out of my zone and fly down to San Mateo, California to present a workshop and 2 talks at the Software Testing and Performance conference. It was a welcome break, and was nice running into old friends and meeting new acquaintances. I had the pleasure of meeting Karen Johnson and reconnecting with Doug Hoffman (who I had only met once previously) for lunch one day, and interestingly enough the conversation found its way to being in the zone. Karen brought up the fact that email is a constant distraction that often times impedes productivity.
Often times when we are in our zone our productivity increases. But, every time something changes our focus, such as responding to an email on a completely unrelated or tangential topic, or answering a phone call we are sucked out of the zone, and according to Lister and DeMarco it takes approximately 30 minutes to get back into the zone or back to our peak point of productivity.
For example, when I sit down to write, or code, or meditate I don't want to be disturbed and will usually retreat to my boat or some quite place where I know I won't be disturbed. I turn off my cell phone, no radios, no newspapers, magazines, no instant messaging (which I abhor) , and certainly no email. If I must stay at the office, then I block of my calendar for at least 4 hours and will sometimes disappear into some nook or cranny on campus.
I know that email is the life blood of many tech-companies. Unfortunately, I suspect that many of us could use a good bloodletting and need to relearn the art of verbal communication. I also suspect that we could better optimize our time by not being tethered to some email client during every single minute our waking hours. Let's face reality. For most of us 80% of the email we get is noise that we will forget about within the next 4 hours or so, 15% is good to know stuff (but not necessarily critical to our success), and I suspect that approximately 5% is really important stuff that we must respond to immediately. Of course, these percentages depend on our primary job. For example a manager or a consultant probably gets a larger percentage of email the requires immediate response.
So, I wonder if we managed our own use of email (and instant messaging) a bit more effectively how our own personal productivity might increase?
Comments
Anonymous
May 07, 2008
I.M. Testy, Yes, I couldn't agree more. I'm a software tester who is suffering from my team's love affair with email. I disabled my email pop-up notifications in an effort to stay focused and now my manager constantly stops by my cube asking, "did you get my email?". I wrote a recent blog post... http://www.testthisblog.com/2008/04/sick-of-chaos.html ...about my team's twisted habit of reporting bugs via email instead of logging bugs in the bug DB.Anonymous
May 12, 2008
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