christophilus

Communication Firehose

Without intentionality, you will find yourself at the center of a barrage of notifications. Each one clamoring for your attention. Each one giving you that dopamine hit. Each one making you feel productive. Each one distracting you from your actual work.

Busyness and productivity are rarely the same thing. (My most productive moments often happen in a hammock.) It's possible to be too busy to get anything meaningful done.

The big picture

What are the sources of interruption and distraction in your life? It's worth taking the time to reflect and write them down. Here's a helpful starting point:

"Wait, wait," some of you say. "You cheated there by tossing in a bunch of non-business social media platforms."

Well, you're a human being, not an AI chatbot. When you're assessing information and communication overload, you need to assess the entire picture, not just the 9-5.

If your job is to get focused, creative, deep-thinking work done, then your number one priority is to cull that long list of communication channels. If you can get it down to one or two, you win.

If you can get it to zero, you've accomplished Zen.

Potential for interruption is a productivity-killer

I've found that the potential for interruption is my real focus-killer. It's not the interruption that bothers me as much as it is the anticipation of interruption. The ever-present potential keeps my brain from sliding into that deep-focus groove. In the back of my head, there's always a little man reining me in and saying, "Woah woah! Slow down! There may be trouble around that corner!"

Every day, I set aside a place and time for uninterruptible focus.

My system

"What do I need to do next?"

I ask this question several times per day. There's a single place where I find the answer. That place is GitHub. I don't have to search across a broad range of tools to answer that question, and neither should you. Simplicity is they key to productivity.

I also don't participate in a long list of communication systems. When my GitHub notifications are clear, I'm done with communication. If something is really urgent, my teammates know to text or call me (my phone lets them through its 24/7 do-not-disturb mode).

By minimizing time spent on communication, I am able to maximize time spent delivering value. By having only one source of communication, I'm able to avoid the frictional cost of searching for information across a million different places. "Now, where did I have that conversation, again?" It's always GitHub.

Speaking from experience, that cost really adds up over time. It's well worth the effort to eliminate it. You may not be able to get yourself down to a single communication channel, but you'll benefit from being intentional about it. I've never been happier than I currently am, and my tightly-controlled communication strategy is a big part of why.