5 tips to mitigating development distractions
Metaphor time! Writing code is much like writing poetry. In order to write a good piece of code, it take knowledge, inspiration and focus. But how can you focus in a busy office?
Unless you remove yourself from the office, you cannot eliminate distractions, but you can reduce them with these 5 steps.
1. Encourage people to contact you over instant message or email
IM and email can be moved out of the way while you are focusing on something. So it’s not the same as someone asking you “Did you see the email I sent 2 seconds ago?”. I call this the “Personal Attachment”, were they practically send themselves as an attachment to the email.
2. Always respond to emails and IM message
Even if you are going to be busy all/most of the day, or don’t have an answer to the question posed in the message. Saying something like “I’m not sure about this question. let me dig into this and get back to you.” or “I’m really slammed with this X project, please let me get back to you.”. Ignoring people, encourages them to follow up personally. It’s their job to get and have answers. I myself am not aways good at this, but when I am, I notice I have less interruptions.
3. Do not distract others
Don’t be a hypocrite, and complain when other need your attention while you feel busy. If everyone did this, there would be no reason for a post like this.
4. Explain your decisions on matters
The more you explain why, the more others can anticipate what your answer might be on a reoccurring matter.
5. Documentation
If you can direct people to a wiki or document server for common answers and templates, you will save your time and others as well. But, be kind about it. No one likes a “Document Nazi”. Just because some topic has a wiki page on it, doesn’t mean that it was written in an understandable fashion.
Jason Fried said, “We don’t have a work day anymore. We have work moments”. I could not agree more.
