Coding in Solidarity
It’s been almost 7 years for me in tech. And I am not going to lie, I had my ups and downs with my work. There are days when I can understand and implement the whole business logic in a day and there have been days I could not identify the bugs for my code even after weeks.
Currently, I am working as a lead in one of the greatest unicorns in India. As a lead, with growing size of teams and projects I get to face different other teams, PMs and leads beside my own team members. And I have to understand what they want to achieve and help them. And I also explain my blocker or bottlenecks and ask for their opinion or help. Sometimes, there are too many cooks, mails or messages simultaneously. And most of them need your attention in priority. I am not a superhuman and it becomes overwhelming for me when so many threads are open at the same time. My work also involves learning various architectures and their related performances for various applications. That means I will have to keep up to the pace of important papers, their use cases and implementation guides. And with so many increasing tasks, it was difficult for me to provide my complete attention to one problem at a time, which resulted in half baked decisions and spending time to correct them.
So, I started introducing Solidarity in my work and life. This is my Nth appreciation draft for Solidarity. Solidarity is a state of oneness with your own thoughts and control over it. It helps you to declutter your thoughts and give a deeper perspective of what you want to achieve in the end. Coding + Solidarity has given me a deep sense of understanding what I really want to prioritise and achieve by connecting the dots and tying all pieces of logic as a single entity.
It has not only increased my focus on my work but it has also increased my decision making quality and pace of developing solutions. I started reviewing more code. I was able to read more. And also got time for experimenting new implementations for my projects, both personal and professional. All because I left myself in a state of solitude with one problem at a time. And during this time I do not allow myself to check my mobile, mails and messages. I also make sure that I only have access to knowledge related to my task and nothing else. Being on the information highway is a bliss but the current can take you away too fast. You will be lost for hours even before you realise you are lost.
Context Switching is not easy so I always try to ensure that the information stays relevant to the task I am completing right now. Keeping yourself focused on one task at a time with all the contextual knowledge makes you better, professionally and personally. Dealing with multiple projects and with different tasks can leave you baffled with the things that you want to achieve at a time. In general, Leaders do not face such problems when they work with different pillars or segments of their work. I am not in leadership right now, but ask a leader and you will understand, they mostly take decisions. They have a vision that they have gained after being in solitude with their work. A key role they perform is to prevent teams from pitfalls and guide towards the vision of their cause. All the summaries and information they learn help in achieving one task, moving towards their vision. Define the scope of your task and its related context and you will be in solidarity with your work.
Productivity is directly proportional to the amount you spend in solidarity. A recent set of studies have shown that productivity has hit for many employees who are working from home post CoVID-19 outbreak. I wonder why this happens. My hypothesis can be summarised in two points. First, you are not able to differentiate the boundaries between your work space and personal space. Second, not being able to focus on work space or personal space at a time because of the responsibilities assigned in both spaces. I would highly recommend that you dedicate yourself a space at your home so you think just about your work when you are in that space and outside of which you have your happy personal life ready to take you with open hands. This has increased my productivity. I hope you can grow from here too.
To keep myself active over time, I use Pomodoro Technique to stay focused and allow myself a 5 min non technical break, which includes fixing myself with a bottle of water, stretching my legs and spine. These supposedly menial tasks not only freshen up my mood and perspective, they also help in avoiding the mess of context switching. I also keep myself hydrated and get plenty of sleep. This helps you to retain and recall more and more contextual information. These are some key methods to achieve deep work.
Few of my great Ideas and automation came to my mind while working in solidarity. My learnings became more meaningful when I started learning in solidarity. Solidarity requires strong will and a lot of patience, which one can earn by taking small steps towards solidarity.
Appreciate and feel gratitude for your achievements with deep thoughts and work you focused on. Listening to your thoughts and putting it in code can be difficult to hear, in this age of information and connectivity. I only wish you start focusing on solidarity from this moment and declutter your thoughts and actions for greater good.
