Introduction

Let’s pretend for a moment. You’re in a hospital being prepped for major surgery. As the nurses ask questions about your health history and allergies, they’re intermittently checking in on Facebook and taking selfies for Instagram. Then, as they’re beginning to insert a needle into your arm, they get an alert on their phone that they have a new message. They stop to check the email and then respond to it. All the while, you’re just sitting there. Waiting.

It’s not encouraging. At this moment in time, it’s entirely fair to expect that the medical team’s attention should be focused 100% on you and that needle.

Now imagine the next step. After you’re wheeled into the operating room and being prepped, you notice the medical team browsing Facebook, checking email, and texting. Even as the surgery is about to start, they’re checking Instagram, taking selfies captioned “About to start on this crazy complex surgery!” and typing emails on their phones. Your anesthesiologist browses Instagram with one hand while adjusting dials with the other. Right as the anesthesia kicks in, each person on the medical team is still in some state of mild distraction. Did I mention that none of them got more than a couple of hours of sleep last night and skipped breakfast this morning? Also the surgeon has a couple of other surgeries he’s going to pop in and out of while performing yours.

How would you feel about the chances of your surgery going well?

Thankfully, that’s not how it works, and there’s a reason surgeons and medical teams don’t work this way. So why do software teams tolerate it? Does a job have to be about life and death before we take distractions seriously and evict them from our workspaces? Why can’t we all place that level of value on focus? Why do we continue to try to multi-task and spread our focus around? Why do we let meetings and interruptions slice our days into useless bits?

If you’re in the business of creating software, you know what it feels like to be in the zone. It’s fantastic. You’re focused and productive. Your code works on the first try. The rest of the world melts away, and everything falls into place. These days it feels as if finding time in the zone is harder than ever. Between all of the distractions, interruptions, and meetings, it feels as if there’s just no time to get any real work done.

It doesn’t have to be that way. It’s entirely possible for us to improve our focus and increase our productivity without working more hours. It’s entirely possible to get the same amount of real work done in fewer hours. However, it requires self-awareness, diligence, and an appreciation of how our brains work. The ability to minimize interruptions and distractions is yours. You just have to exercise it.

Now, let’s talk specifically about software development. It’s a complex process that requires significant amounts of focus while holding extensive amounts of information and context in your head. Unfortunately, building software also requires you to spend time in front of devices that are inherently distracting. So your focus as a software developer is both priceless and difficult to maintain. And when interruptions carry an extra 15-30 minutes of context-switching overhead, it can be tough to get anything done. Sometimes, it feels hopeless to the point that getting a full day of quality deep work is the exception rather than the rule.

Fortunately, research has increasingly shown all of us how to address these problems. Get more sleep. Eat better. Stay hydrated. Exercise. Rest. Renew. Disable alerts and notifications. Studies have shown again and again that neglecting these in the name of squeezing just a little more productivity out of your day never works because eventually, the well runs dry. Conversely, improving in these areas improves your cognition, focus, and creativity.

So how can we improve our productivity without being draconian about it? (After all, happiness is just as important for productivity as anything else.) Can we make small modifications to break bad habits or encourage good ones? Can we be more deliberate about how we collaborate to reduce interruptions for teammates? Can we design our workspaces to be more conducive to focus and engagement with our work?

The answer to all of these is a resounding yes, and there’s research to prove it.

While it may be difficult to quantify productivity, there’s plenty of ways we can all make small changes to improve it. And remember, this isn’t just about making a more efficient assembly line. It’s about becoming more efficient at the most important work we do. That efficiency translates to more experience and knowledge and improving your own skills faster. Or maybe it leads to working fewer overall hours and spending more time with friends and family or on your hobbies. And conveniently enough, that kind of recharging has shown to be a pretty effective way to improve your productivity as well.

Regardless of your motivation for increasing productivity, we’ll explore a variety of methods and tactics that can help improve productivity. Of course, every person and organization is different, but there’s likely some tactics and ideas in here that could work for you as well.

We’ll start by exploring ways to become more aware of your productivity levels and the factors that affect it. Then we’ll dive into tactics to help you get in the zone with less time and effort, and then move on to staying in the zone. In the end, we’ll finish up by embracing the fact that distractions and interruptions are inevitable and talk about ways to help reduce the downtime that results from context-switching so you can get back into the zone with as little downtime as possible.

Sound good? Great. Let’s get started.