Pragmatic Geek

Today is a transition point for me: I officially start a new role tomorrow (same company, different division). What’s key about this  new role is how it fits into my growing awareness of the importance of focus, and how the lack of focus has been a source of stress and unhappiness.

I used to describe myself as a vicious multitasker. I was proud of how many threads I could juggle, with its corresponding appearance of throughput. “Hey, I’ve got 3 instant message conversations going, a voice call, and an active code debug session running.” Those days are gone.

Time and attention are finite resources for all of us, and while time marches on, the only thing we have ultimate control of is what gets our attention. There are constant forces seeking to fragment our attention:

• Multiple projects. When you’ve got multiple active projects assigned by management, you need to keep up appearances that you’re working on all of them. You push each project forward a bit, never sitting down down and making major progress on a single one. In computer terms, it’s called “thrashing”
• Lack of priorities. Multiple projects are made worse when they are all equally important. Many folks won’t admit that there’s a difference between projects being critical and the fact that one of them has to take precedence. The individual is forced to set their own priorities, and 2 individuals may choose differently, which creates conflict.
• Meetings. Since people have different schedules, the “necessary” coordination meetings get scheduled throughout the day. Given multiple projects, you can’t find uninterrupted blocks of time to focus on the doing of the project.

If I were a better note keeper, I’d have a ton of links and quotes on the subject. Here are a few:

• David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done.” Get beyond the surface stuff of efficiency and time management, and he’s really talking about focus and the trust that whatever you are doing at a given moment is the best thing you can be doing.
• Merlin Mann gained fame as a productivity blogger, and has since evolved into a huge advocate for focus and getting to work on the creative process.
• Paul Graham’s classic Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule sums up the tension between the corporate world and passionate developers.
• The Modern Meeting Standard, a way to bring a form of focus to bad meetings

For kicks, I’ll throw in a picture that made me chuckle. It may not look it, but I was totally having fun, in part because I was focused. This was taken the Minnesota Orchestra Fantasy Camp, where amateur musicians got to perform along side the professionals. I was obviously just counting rests at this point, but, wow, I was in the zone.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2011 at 9:39 pm and is filed under diary, opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.