attention
It's commonly known, or claimed atleast, that interruptions and context switching destroy productivity.
Yet the tools we use to work seem riddled with it. Most don't care about breaking your attention, taking your focus.
Slack is one of the worst for it, although I'll give it to them that new features are improving that and it of all things has a place to be disruptive.
Jira forces you to awkwardly jump around a lot, which means it's to accidentally overload with information and break focus.
How we work on tasks, even, as engineers:
- Create a ticket (or lots) 1b. Do the stupid ticket admin of moving it across a board
- Do some work, like writing code.
- Share the output for others to review
- Merge changes after review + possibly unlimited review/edit cycles
- (Sometimes) manually test changes
- Deploy changes
- Monitor deployment
- Monitor and analyse usage
Some of us (me included on bad days) will sit and twiddle thumbs at point 3, being 'blocked'. Other times, we'll pick up more work and repeat 2-3 however many times before we get to step where we are then juggling x number of plates anywhere between step 2-8.
We make it easy to lose attention. The way we work is broken, and our tools actively encourage it in favour of feeling busy.
How do we improve it?