Now that I’ve gone through my notes on Deep Work it’s time to form a plan
on how to put them into action.
A Deep Work Routine & Ritual
My work day starts with a stand up at nine o’clock every day. My goal is a fixed
rhythmic routine of deep work every day of the week from 10:00 to 14:00. This
gives me an hour after stand up to put out any fires, respond to any coworker
requests and then go into lock down.
The routine looks like this:
- Decide on what I will be working on, and get any unanswered questions answered
for the Deep Work session the day prior.
- Take care of the needs for all of the pets so they won’t be their own
distractions during the deep work session.
- Close out of Slack, Discord, and Thunderbird on the computer. Put the phone on
priority DND and set it face down outside of arm’s reach. Close all tabs not
directly related to the work in Firefox.
- Make a full Stanly thermos of coffee so there is no need to brew more during
the deep work session
- Meditate for ten minutes before transiting into the session.
At 1400, grab lunch, pause for a thirty minute Internet block to check Slack,
Discord, Thunderbird. Read the RSS feed for the day and catch up on Mastodon.
The last two or three hours of the work day is dedicated to smaller engineering
tasks, research, gathering resources and asking questions for the next day’s
deep work session.
After 1400 we can use productive meditation to contemplate the next steps or
challenges that will require deep work to resolve.
Shut Down Ritual and Relaxation
At 2330 of each day is a thirty minute shut down ritual that casually follows
some of the ideas from Getting Things Done:
- Mark all the done items in my bullet journal done in Todo.txt.
- Empty all Inboxes into my Todo.txt or calendar. These inboxes might be
ideas scribbled in the bullet journal during the day, e-mails, or tomorrow’s
events in the calendar. If an e-mail can be responded to quickly (less than a
minute) than quickly dash it out to keep it off the list.
- Decide on the one thing to be done during tomorrow’s deep work session.
- Prioritize the items in Todo.txt, and jot down the items prioritized for
tomorrow in my bullet journal.
- Clap and say, “It is done.” Leave the home office, closing the door behind me
and leaving work behind for the remainder of the day.
I sleep at 0200, so this gives me three hours to wind down with reading fiction
or playing games on the Switch.
Elimination Distraction
Do an inventory of your network tools.
Locking down the Smart Phone
- The purpose of the Smart phone is (1) a communication device, (2) a GPS
navigator and (3) a music player. Any usage outside of these three should be
circumspect: games, web browsering, and video are right out.
- Remove Tusky, Discord, and other distracting chat applications from the phone
- Remove the browser from the home screen to remove the temptation to surf the
web when bored
- Audit all notifications. Remove all but priority notifications. If possible,
only notify for texts and e-mails from spouse and supervisors.
Locking down the PC
- Schedule fixed Internet blocks during the day for network tool use (Slack,
Discord, E-mail, Mastodon, RSS). Right now, this is 1400-1430. For additional
Internet blocks, record in the bullet journal at the end of each block the
next Internet block.
- Make a habit of closing out of all network tools – applications and tabs,
whenever I am in the Deep Work session. Outside of Internet blocks, leave
Slack alone open.
- Audit the RSS feed each quarter to remove any blogs that haven’t sparked joy
Deep Work suggests doing an inventory of your network tools and identifying if
they substantially positively impact, negatively impact, or little impact
the success of your personal and professional goals.
Looking through my bookmarks, phone, and logs, I come up with the following in
order of usage:
- Slack
- Mastodon
- RSS
- Email
- Discord
- SMS
- Voice and/or video phone
Notably missing from my list, thanks to a continuing effort to pair down the
destractions and shallow work in my life over the last few years are Hacker
News, Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook.
The first three were rather hard. It’s easy to become caught up in the belief
that keeping up on industry news, watching conference recordings, and reading
about the latest tool (that will never appear in your working stack) is a
productive use of time. I’ve reached the conclusion that reading about a new
tool or technique is only useful if you intend on immediately putting that tool
or technique to use. Otherwise, it’s just another form of entertainment. By the
time you actually need that tool, whatever reading you did on it will long gone
from memory.
Twitter was easy. Twitter was amusing, but ultimately pointless.
Facebook. I still keep an account there. After several years of doing “internet
sabbaticals,” it occurred to me that the only use I have for Facebook is it’s
original use – as a personal rolodex for reaching out to firends and relatives
via other mediums. Liking the latest iteration of someone’s vacation photos is
not maintaining a relationship with them. Calling them, or taking them out to
lunch when you’re in town is. So Facebook sits, and I log into it once a
quarter. It’s draw for distraction entirely broken.
This leaves the remaining network tools and the question: Do they provide a
substantially positive impact on my personal and professional goals?
Slack
Ther are two Slack servers that I am on and while both are for work they serve
substantially different purposes.
There is my dayjob Slack server. Fortunately, my CTO is of a similar mindset in
terms of keeping distraction down. We treat slack as an asychronous channel.
Unless you mention someone, there is no expectation of an immediate response.
Mentions and channel-wide broadcasts are pretty much unheard. We don’t have bots
clogging up the main channels, although individuals are free to add bot for
their own personal distraction.
My second Slack server is {az}Devs, which is a free-based server for the
development community in the Arizona area with a heavy lean towards remote
developers. As a rural developer, {az}Devs is a great way to keep in touch and
network with the Urban based developers. One of my big insecurities of being so
remote is that networking opportunities can be hard to come by and difficult or
expensive to orchestrate.
My current configuration is Slack on phone and computer – but tuned to only
notify or display a visual indicator for mentions. If there are no mentions, I
keep to checking Slack strictly to Internet blocks. {az}Devs are not on my
phone and all notifications there are disabled.
Does it provide a substantially positive impact? Yes.
Mastodon
Mastodon is perhaps my greatest time waster lately. It very much reminds me of
the old web. Small communities, international in scope, but very niche in their
interests. On a small instance, you meet people, learn about their hobbies and
interests. It doesn’t take long to start recognizing a name from day to day and
a community forms around it.
As a remote worker it also serves as a nice water cooler to chat with like
minded hackers about work.
It’s hard to say that Mastodon has a substantially positive impact on my
personal or professional goals. It’s definitely in the shallow category.
I’ve worked on cutting Mastodon down from being too much of dopamine-hit. I
think the big movements are 1) take Tusky off my phone and 2) no more developing
and chatting on Mastodon at the same time during the work day. Keep Mastodon
confined to dedicated Internet blocks.
Does it provide a substantially positive impact? No. Little impact.
RSS replaced Hacker News and Reddit as my source for industry and entertainment
news. It works much more off the “pull” concept where my reader pulls stories
from a selection of blogs rather than the “push” you see on Social Media news
feed where articles are foisted upon you.
Is RSS an improvement or merely a replacement for Hacker News/Reddit?
Ocassionally, a solid article comes along with truly fascinating information.
Yet, I am often troubled with the notion that I could be spending that time
reading a good book or researching a particular topic that interests me.
I’ve established a handful of rules for adding an RSS feed to my reader. It must
1) not update more than once a day (an exception is made for the local paper),
and 2) it has to pass the Konmari test. That is to say, does the feed spark joy?
When I see that a new post is in my feed does my heart jump with excitement to
read the article? #2 is hard to keep true since a blog might have a handful of
killer articles and degenerate into personnal rambling. Regular culling,
flipping through each feed and seeing if the last few articles sparked joy is
needed.
Does it provide a substantially positive impact? No. Little impact.
Email
Email is the traditional villian in these discussions of distration. Yet, I’ve
never felt too troubled by e-mail. Perhaps it’s a generational thing. I find
inbox to zero and ignoring e-mails rather easy. I do get a couple dozen log
files each morning that takes all of 30 seconds to review. I try to tune Jira
and Github notifications to as minimal as possible. Email is generally useful
for my professional work and certainly less distracting than Slack.
Does it provide a substantially positive impact? Yes.
Discord
Discord, far more than Facebook, has been a great resource for reconnecting with
friends. What better way to connect than over some random shared PC gaming and
voice chat? That almost all of my gamer friends already have Discord installed
makes it an easy excuse to fire up a game.
There’s also local servers for connecting with other gamers in the White
Mountians looking to play board games, roleplaying, and Magic. It’s by far the
best resource for meeting new people with shared interests in my remote mountain
town.
Last, Damasca community, after years of failing to rekindle things over
Minecraft, IRC, etc. has actually congealed around a Discord server, sharing
music, chatting about old times, and daydreaming about ventures in indie games.
Still, it should probably follow the same kinds of limitations as Discord. Not
on the phone, and limited to Internet blocks only.
Does it provide a substantially positive impact? Yes.
SMS
I never really got into texting. I exchange the occassional text with the spouse
through the day to keep abreast of our schedules. On ocassion I text family, but
very rarely. It never caught on with me.
Does it provide a substantially positive impact? Yes.
Voice and Video Conferencing
Voice and Video Conferencing (regardless of the application) are perhaps my
least used network tools but also perhaps provide the highest quality when they
are used.
Work tends to realize that any time spent on a conference calls is time spent
using 100% of a developers capacity. They don’t make these meetings lightly when
an asynchronous solution is available. Hotfixes. Daily stand ups. That’s about
it. That said, I would always be careful of maintaining this high standard of
asychronous first and video conferencing only when it is the best medium for the
problem.
Personal phone calls to friends and family are also high quality exchanges. If
anything, I should make more phone calls.
Does it provide a substantially positive impact? Yes.
Results
So far, with a couple rules in place for avoiding distraction, there are no
substantially negative impacting networking tools in my regular usage. There two
items of little impact that I’ve put some rules around and I think should be
monitored each quarter to ensure that they continue to be either of little or
moving into a positive impact.
