If you regularly follow my Twitter stream, you may be confused by what appear to be contradictory tweets about wanting to have uninterrupted periods of time at work and wanting to move off the computer and socialize more. I admit that it is quite confusing, so I thought I’d go into a bit more detail here.
For those of you who don’t know, I’m one half of the “development team” at Sephone. (There are more than two people who do development at the company, but I’m one of the two people who don’t split their time between dev and design.) As the company has grown, more and more people take part in the development process. I have to say, it’s great to see fellow employees learning and growing with their experience. At the same time, though, this inevitably leads to an increase in the number of questions directed at the two of us, both because we have the most dev experience in the company and because we’re fairly well versed in the projects that are currently active.
Development is one of those jobs that requires a lot of concentration. An increase in the number of interruptions and distractions greatly affects the productivity of a developer (and I’m not the only one who believes this). As an informal supervisor of anywhere between five and ten other people with various levels of development knowledge, these interruptions add up quickly. We’ve tried a number of ways to remedy this situation: devoted blocks of time during the day for questions (“office hours”), weekly development meetings, lunch ‘n learn educational sessions.
These communication limitations lead to a pretty noticeable consequence: isolation. Isolation can be wonderful for productivity, but it leads to an atmosphere of untouchability and unapproachability. Due partially to the fact that we’ve been fortunate enough to have a fairly full workload and partially to the limits we’ve attempted to set in place, I haven’t felt as though I’ve been part of the *other* parts of the development process for quite some time. And I’ll openly admit that I really miss that interaction with the other people in the company.
Over the past couple of days I’ve been discussing some options for the future with my co-workers over lunch. We’re going to have a few new interns once we move to our new office in a couple of weeks, and we wanted to do some preemptive brainstorming to discover ways that we could maintain some amount of productivity while still having a relaxed, friendly, and sociable environment between employees. Here are some of our ideas.
- Use the tools. Over the past couple of years, we’ve really made great progress in our internal documentation for projects. Many of the questions a developer or intern may have about a project are answered in the project’s documentation page or in our past task records. The first lifeline should always be the documentation we already have (as well as a simple Google search for pure development questions).
- Schedule it. It’s difficult to change gears. For some questions, though, an immediate answer isn’t necessary. Saving questions until less active parts of the workday (ie, first thing in the morning or right after lunch) goes a long way to increase productivity.
- Work from home. Working from home can be a great option, especially with larger projects. We trade off out-of-the-office days and find that productivity often rockets through the roof on these days.
- Always be available. While it may decrease productivity, it’s very important to have an environment in which everyone is approachable if necessary. Co-workers should be respectful, though, of any requests to come back at a more convenient time.
It’s important to me to be productive yet sociable; in fact, most of my best experiences at Sephone have been while interacting and brainstorming with other employees. How have you tackled the interruption versus socialization conundrum where you work?