Distractions with teeth
Your productivity versus your news feed
I have a lot of trouble staying focused on my work. I’ve gotten better at it over time — not because my personality has changed, but because I’ve learned how to work around my tendency to distraction. The first step is knowing what pulls you to your distractions.
I read some posts because I’m afraid of missing out on what they say. Hacker News is a great source for headlines that play to this type of thinking. For example, here’s a recent post title:
I Code to Procrastinate When I Should be Growing My Startup
This one makes me feel like, unless I read it, I won’t even know if I’m coding or secretly-procrastinating-and-only-pretending-to-code. Well, crap. Thanks, headline.
Other headlines look innocuous, yet still make us want to read them out of a sense that something might go wrong. Consider this title:
Tim Berners-Lee: we need to re-decentralise the web
Before seeing this headline, I was not worried about an overly centralized web. I haven’t read the article, but now I think something might be going wrong on a large scale.
We fear not knowing something we’re supposed to know. Coder culture is saturated with a sense of what we’re supposed to know. If a fellow coder says, “Oh, just throw together a custom rtmp server in erlang. It’s easy,” then I’m going to feel like an idiot asking what rtmp is. Somewhere deep down, I know it’s ok to not know an acronym the first time I hear it. I hate asking ignorance-revealing questions when they come tinged with a sense of judgment, even if I try to reject that feeling.
That supposed to know feeling spills beyond fear of the unknown and into a desire to know everything that might conceivably be related to what we do. Thirst for knowledge is motivating and healthy — but it can become counterproductive. It can feel like an obligation.
Consider the 114-page paper What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory by Ulrich Drepper. Not every programmer truly needs to know every detail of this paper. It is a well-written paper that might prove invaluable to some developers optimizing memory-bottlenecked code. Other developers can get a lot done in the time they save not reading this.
I used to be a sucker for titles like that. I still have a feeling of what I’m supposed to know, but my rational mind now rejects that concept. There is a higher priority on my time: getting done what I set out to do. I don’t wake up in the morning thinking to myself, “self, I’d like to look for a set of random articles on technical topics I have not yet fully mastered, and spend all day reading those.” Well, based on my personality, I might actually enjoy that. But the point is that my focus has improved remarkably by becoming conscious of my motivations for reading certain articles.
In the past, when I saw an article with knowledge I felt I was missing out on, I used to have a hard choice — between the guilt of procrastinating working or the guilt of procrastinating reading the article. Now I can rationally choose to never read an article, and get on with my work.
Oh, and I usually bookmark those articles anyway. I don’t expect to read them, but it’s easier to close the tab that way.
