Cognitive Endurance Basics for Software Developers
It’s this time of the year when people run marathons — some are so devoted as to not only run but to crawl to the finish line for a noble cause — and I recalled an article which basically says that software product development is a marathon, too. As in, if you want to create and maintain a decent product or an app, individually or in a team, you’ve got to brace yourself up for a long-distance marathon run. While I agree with the long-distance and endurance part, I’d rather compare this not to a marathon but to a triathlon race. Triathlon requires diverse skills; you’ve got to swim and to bike alongside running, and, as the author of the article that I recalled justly posits, software developers need diverse skills, too. By the way, quite a few folks whom I personally know do triathlon as a hobby, so there really must be something to it.
Just like in triathlon, the diverse personal and social/group skills needed to develop a software require that you keep up your endurance with all of them, learning to alternate your activities, such as coding, researching, coming up with solutions, and empathizing with others, all while keeping a workable race rate. Success in this race comes as a by-product of following some subtle endurance tips and tricks. Our brains are our most indispensable tools, and we absolutely have to take every effort to groom not only our own brains, but also the ones owned by our colleagues/team mates!
I keep saying it time and again: there’s nothing ever more important to us as professionals than taking good care of our brains. Well, and of our bodies, obviously, because brains work better in alternation with physical exercise, and apparently the folks that do triathlon sense that in some way. I’ve touched upon this brain-care subject one way or another in a number of articles (see “Related” section below), and this caring attitude would ideally stem from our org/team culture in many subtle ways. It’s a paradox, but very often we’re unaware of how those small bummers at work are killing our performance and draining our cognitive powers. For quick reference, cognitive is anything related to mental processes: attention, memory, talking, listening, learning, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making.
This diagram shows the interrelated network of the processes going on in our brains when we work. If you come across some bummers disrupting those processes, the performance of your brain wanes for any given day, and unless you do something non-mental for a change (like, hang out with your family, or friends, or do some triathlon training, or cooking, or gardening, or play a musical instrument, etc.), your brain capacity would not restore itself just so.
The sources of work-related cognitive disruptions can be broken down into 3 groups:
- Process-related. Anything that has to do with the glitches and communication issues arising from a sloppy development process, e.g. too many meetings, loose online messaging instead of focused face-to-face conversations, not knowing who to go to and where to report to if there’s an issue that needs to be solved. These would be purely cognitive disruptions.
- Workspace-related. These ones are more about the general feeling good, although in the end they boil down to cognition, too, since all those kinds of workspace-related stresses end up in the brain as well. What if someone is allergic to air conditioning and just wants a flow of fresh air? Or, how about the lights? What if someone prefers natural light to the LED lights? The most notorious workspace-related disruption wouldn’t be the lights or air, though. It’s the white noise produced by all kinds of office sounds. The impact of workspace-related disruptions depends on personal sensitivity. Someone senses them very acutely, feeling that this something is really tiring their brain. Others may be unaware of the direct impact, but they are affected all the same. I wish everyone could put such a plate on their desk:
- Individual. This is about personal time management skills and will power. Things like: if you start your day with social media, or news media, skimming through stuff which is irrelevant or loosely relevant to what you’re working on, don’t be surprised if you’re drained by noon, when it occurs to you that you never got down to doing the thing(s) that would actually make you call your day a productive one.
Of those 3 kinds of disruptions, the first two are rooted in the org/team culture and need to be addressed at a company level first. In fact, if a company nurtures the culture of keeping everyone’s flow and takes good care of the workspace, it’s much easier for people to perform at their best on an individual level. I mean, not everyone is a personal productivity guru. Well, of course, staying away from all kinds of online time wasters and doing things successively, one after another, is entirely in our personal power, but it’s our org/team/company that can seriously lend a helping hand (unlike what’s shown below).
I intend to write more on cognitive disruptions and on what can be done to tackle them both at an org/team level and individually.
Related:
Two Approaches to Focus in Knowledge Work
The Silver Bullet for Productivity
Continuous Problem-Solving Is No Accident
Remember to Get Up and Stretch
5 Things We Need for Sustainable Performance at Work
This story is based on an earlier article.
