[rickyyean]

Working in limited timed sprints could feel odd if you're not used to pomodoro, and it could be difficult for certain tasks. David shared his experiment in the other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28222665

We have worked with several employers to bring Flow Club to their employees to help create opportunities for deep work, but the problem is bigger than that. From Cal Newport's New Yorker article last year (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise...): "The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner. But the cumulative effect of such constant, unstructured communication is cognitively harmful: on the receiving end, the deluge of information and demands makes work unmanageable. There’s little that any one individual can do to fix the problem."

[codingdave]

I've found that individuals absolutely can change organizational behavior. Setting teams norms is a simple first step that establishes what the expectations on response times truly are for various communication channels. It takes 15 minutes in a team meeting, and almost instantly improves team culture. All it takes is one leader to put that discussion on an agenda, and the entire team can relax and let message piles up while they get work done, because everyone has a shared understanding of how the team has chosen to operate.

This isn't just theory - My company was downright sad when the pandemic started when it came to remote culture. But a handful of us stepped up, made suggestions and recommendations, and things have improved greatly. At this point, we have established communication guidelines that are shared with the company, and mostly followed.

The tragedy comes when everybody believes that one person cannot make a difference, so nobody tries.