Uh.. that’s called Do not Disturb mode and disabling notifications ? What am I missing ?

In that work, they cited 15-60 minutes to regain ‘state’ after an interruption. Much has been said of the concept of ‘multitasking’ and how people should get ‘better’ at that, but you might as well tell somebody to become a gifted jazz drummer. Not everybody is *capable* of it and those who are vary in how effectively they can maintain it. However, this does not mean that people incapable of multitasking are better workers. The ability to work tightly focused for long periods of time generally leads to greater productivity and higher quality of work.

I think of it like a modern computer. All modern PCs can multi-task – switch from one task to another. Here’s the thing about multi-tasking: The switching takes time. It’s not magical. So the more time you spend *switching* the less time you spend actually *working*. It’s not enough to just ‘switch’. You also have to keep track of what you’re switching from, to and all of the other things you have in play at the time. When the condition gets too extreme, you can literally be reduced to a ‘fidgetomaton’ where you can no longer actually do *anything* useful because all you can do is to keep track of all the things you’re *supposed to be* doing. This, I suspect, is the essential cause of many nervous breakdowns.

This idea has been in the wild for 48 years. I’m gonna bet it’s not going to catch any more traction now than it ever has before.

This is brilliant!

I think you and I are a minority. I’ve gotten so used to being interrupted both at work and at home, that when I have a long stretch of focus time I start getting antsy. My sweet spot is probably about 10 minutes of concentration and then I need a distraction. Oddly enough I’m considered one of the most productive members of my team, to the point where I get questions about how I’m able to do so much in a day. Unfortunately I can’t answer “get more distracted” because it’s evident that I’m just weird and it only works for me.

Yep. A simple “hello” can set you back half an hour.

Re: Meetings. I know: https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/04/12/are-meetings-making-you-less-productive/

First, preface:
I have ADHD and although I’ve been a dev for over a decade, I started taking medicine in January this year but I tell my physician: I do not think the medicine affects my attention span in any way because I’ve trained myself with much effort to learn to not be (negatively) distracted. Example: I find it not difficult to listen to my dad’s endless, repetitive, meaningless old-man diatribes when I visit him, whereas it used to be torture for me to dial into what he was saying.

Also, I feel I’m “good at multitasking” in mindless tasks. When I worked the cash office at a grocery store in college, I frequently got remarks how I could juggle multiple customer’s demands (check cashing, money orders, returns, lottery, phone calls, etc) simultaneously without making people wait longer than they would’ve had to had I not been helping multiple people. “You’re very good at multitasking” I heard frequently. But all of these tasks were really easy and didn’t require hardly any focus, so IDK if that’s a good example.

End of preface. Other POV:

Sometimes distractions actually _help_ me because my focus on a task has diminishing returns. i.e., the more I concentrate on it, the worse I get. I call it tunnel vision development. Sometimes, in order to think about the problem/solution abstractly and creatively, I need to step away and circle back later. Sometimes I’m able to self-will myself to this (“I’ll go for a walk” or (if WFH) “I’ll go lay down for a minute”). But _sometimes_ I am _not_ able to notice that I am languishing in my hyperfocus mode and the distraction actually becomes a “slap in the face” to force me to wake up and back-burner what I actually wasn’t cooking well. Example: a 3:00 meeting rolls around so I am forced to stop what I’m struggling to work on and focus on the meeting. But when I come back I find I am refreshingly more able to make progress. Etc.

Further, I’ve learned to leverage this a bit when the distractions are inevitable; working in office, receiving communication (emails, IMs, zoom calls, etc) where prompt or immediate reply is expected. When I receive these distractions, I simply take a breath and pretend like I’m “stepping away from my desk” (my desk being that particular task). This has the effect of re-wiring my “multi-tasking” to be “hyper-threading.” The former being an inefficient way of achieving work objectives, the latter being _more_ efficient at achieving objectives. I associate the distraction with more-positive outcomes and I think it helps.

The ultimate point is, I do not “try” to do multiple things at once in effort to “hyper thread.” But having a positive expectation of the distraction-notification seems to help my brain mitigate the distraction’s damage; nay, it even increases its utility.

To be clear: I’m not claiming I am never negatively distracted. Example 1: Sometimes a meeting is boring and I start fiddling and then I’m put on the spot and realize I was spacing out and have to “BS my answer” to make it less obvious I was doing something else lol. Example 2: my _kids_ are 7, 4, and 1 and when I WFH (2 of 5 days / week) they are a beautiful mess of extremely cute, extremely aggravating, and ultimately unwelcome distractions. Many times I lose important focus and this “hyper-threading optimism” hasn’t helped fully with the stress from that. So this isn’t an unlimited solution, but at least in office I find myself bemoaning less those popups or shoulder taps. They can often be an opportunity for me to cook two things better than I was cooking the one thing.

What the sales/marketing head didn’t see, of course, was that the person he asked was in the middle of solving a problem and it had taken him 30 minutes to get to where he was. That one minute interruption meant that he lost his context and had to work his way back again (i.e. another 30 minutes). Once I explained it to him, he did actually understand it and we managed to work out a way of meeting at pre-defined times to handle these simple questions.

Mind you, regular meetings also interrupt your flow…

I was considering getting a flip phone so I could take it places when I wanted to distance myself from notifications and social media, but a friend and I decided we could probably build something ourselves that wouldn’t require having to buy a new phone, pay for another plan, etc.

We ended up building a small device that acts as a “lock” for the distractions on our iPhones – we tap the device to block all of the distracting apps and their notifications, then when we want to “connect” again we simply have to go back to the device and tap it again to unblock everything.

This solution has been working very well for us, so we’ve decided to see if it would work for other people too. If you’re interested, check out the website we put together (we decided on the name Brick): https://getbrick.app/. Any feedback or thoughts on what could make it better would be greatly appreciated!