[DevKoala]

You don’t ignore people who come to talk to you. You tell them politely that you are focused on a task, and to wait until you are free. Over time people learn to send you a message first to coordinate when you are free to talk.

At the company I work for, the norm at the office is to always ask first “is this a good time to discuss X?”. Not even the CTO gets a free pass to interrupt engineers. Actually he was one of the people who coached me to prioritize my focus first and to learn to say “No”.

[iateanapple]

> You tell them politely that you are focused on a task, and to wait until you are free.

If I’m coming to talk to you then I think it’s important enough to interrupt you.

You are in effect gimping local communication.

[DevKoala]

Not at all. The person asking for attention will communicate what topic they want to discuss. I can then evaluate if that topic is more important than whatever I am working or focused on. If I tell the person that they need to wait, they could tell me why I am not doing my priority evaluation correctly and then I’ll reassess. There is no conflict or lack of politeness. The system works well for our team.

[iateanapple]

> The person asking for attention will communicate what topic they want to discuss. I can then evaluate if that topic is more important than whatever I am working or focused on.

I think that’s how the vast majority of office communication works.

If you are properly evaluating the request then you are already knocked out of the zone.

It originally sounded like you were saying you would say the equivalent of “Mate, if the buildings not on fire then send me an email and I’ll get back to you”.

Because that’s how remote staff often get treated - with calls etc just not answered.

[DevKoala]

I am definitely not knocked out of the zone when someone asks me a 5 second question and I give an even shorter reply. I am confident that in a different environment I would have to adapt the method, but in the physical environment I work on (not now due to Corona), the system I described works.

[iateanapple]

> I am definitely not knocked out of the zone when someone asks me a 5 second question and I give an even shorter reply

I’m not understanding how you can possibly understand and prioritise your colleagues requests for help in 5 seconds.

I’d say it takes me 2-3 minutes to understand the average request I get. And it’s 2-3 minutes of deep thought.

[DevKoala]

We have planning meetings in which we determine priorities once a week and everyday during standup we reevaluate priorities. Do you experience these interruptions daily? If a team has to constantly revise priorities in the middle of the day then that is the symptom of a bigger problem. Do you guys write technical design docs before going into implementation?

[jasonv]

Isn't that at odds with the whole point of this post (which I'm not even sure I agree with)..?

People want to be in the same space so they can have small, in-person interactions. Those have softer priorities than intentional communications.

Working in offices, people often do "swing by" and ask if it's a good time to talk about something. It's socializing the issue. If you say "no" and they come back later -- or you go find them, it has all worked out.

[interactivecode]

It is, you are putting your own issue in higher regard just because you don't know someone else’s situation.

When working remotely think ahead and assume your issue/question isn’t as important as you think it is. Because most of the time questions for colleagues aren't as urgent for anyone except you.

[iateanapple]

> It is, you are putting your own issue in higher regard just because you don't know someone else’s situation.

Most of the time the communication is within the team and we do know the other team members situations (work wise).

And we have decided it is important enough to interrupt them.

And we are mostly knowledge workers who understand the cost of interruptions.

Yes, there are bad eggs who waste everyone’s time, but they are in the small minority.

What I find happens a lot is devs focus on their personal productivity ahead of the teams productivity.

[DevKoala]

You don’t prioritize your personal focus, you prioritize an objective. Most often these objectives are very clear to the rest of the team.

Also I can’t believe you “know” something is “important enough to interrupt them”. I work for a place in which the most “junior” dev is worth a quarter of a million dollars a year. I am not going to tell some dude who is probably figuring out a new way to pack data to save us thousands of dollars a day, to take a minute to listen to me. It better be a fire.

[iateanapple]

> Most often these objectives are very clear to the rest of the team.

> Also I can’t believe you “know” something is “important enough to interrupt them”

> “junior” dev is worth a quarter of a million dollars a year

So the objectives of what you are working on are very clear and yet your very highly paid colleagues aren’t responsible or sensible enough to understand when it’s appropriate to interrupt you?

[DevKoala]

When the objectives are clear, we understand our priorities, and there is very little reason for interruption. Today for example, outside of meetings, I don’t think I communicated with a single coworker. I had a few 1-1’s for pair programming, and those were scheduled during standup. Is your organization aware of studies on interruption? It seems nobody understand the problem.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/190891/programmer_int...

[matthewowen]

the bad eggs can be in the minority as members of the population, but still provide the majority of interruptions: the good eggs know to be judicious about it, but the bad eggs just interrupt and interrupt and interrupt.

[iateanapple]

Agreed - so why not deal with the bad eggs individually?

Because at the end of the day most managers aren’t really concerned with productivity - it’s far easier and less emotionally draining to just proscribe blanket bans.

That’s one of the main reasons remote working hasn’t taken off more.