Some great tips here from Will Larson on how to improve internal communications as a leader. I especially like “Maintain the drip”:

These updates establish a persistent drip of information from you to the wider organization. Some weeks you might have a light update, but rather than folks thinking that you’re not doing much, they’ll be reassured that they are up-to-date on what’s important. Dense updates are good, but it’s the brief updates that reassure the team that you would have updated them if there was something they needed to know.

Read on for the others: test before broadcasting, build the packet, and use every channel.

• Surreal Animal Mashups by Ingo Lindmeier. This one lives up to the title.
• Interesting research on Time Savings When Working from Home and what we’re spending that extra time on. It’s mostly for more work! “The average daily time savings when working from home is 72 minutes in our sample. […] Workers allocate 40 percent of their time savings to their jobs and about 11 percent to caregiving activities.”
• See also: Why 2023 Could Finally Be the Year of the 4-Day Workweek. “Among the reporting countries in the 4 Day Week study, revenues rose an average of 8.14% and increased a whopping 37.55% in comparison with the same period the previous year.”
• But then also see: Job searching and interviewing is a nightmare — and only getting worse. “It’s important to remember that if a company’s hiring process feels off, working there might feel off, too.”
• I’m never relinquishing my closet of DVDs. I can definitely relate—it’s why I still buy vinyl and CDs. “Unless you have a physical disc in hand, you really don’t have control over what happens to it.”
• Wonders of Street View. Weird things picked up by Google Street View. Easy to get way too lost in these.
• I’ve been spending more time on Mastodon now that Ivory is available for iOS. It’s a wonderful app and it’s really fun over there. Come join us!

Sometimes the internet seems to think about the same things at the same time. Last week we were all in on meetings (see here, here, here, and here), and this week we’re all talking about distractions. Here are three excellent articles about this topic that all came across my feeds this week.

First, there is a new interview with the father of deep work, Cal Newport (NYT gift article link). He talks about context switching and “slow productivity”—and it’s really good:

I’m trying to develop this notion of productivity that’s based on, at the large time scales, the production of things you’re proud of and that have high impact, but on the small time scale, there’s periods where you’re doing very little. […] So how do you actually work with your mind and create things of value? What I’ve identified is three principles: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, but obsessing over quality. That trio of properties better hits the sweet spot of how we’re actually wired and produces valuable meaningful work, but it’s sustainable.

Matt Reynolds has a catchy title in Wired: Easily Distracted? You Need to Think Like a Medieval Monk. It’s a fun exploration of how medieval monks were, as he calls them, “the original LinkedIn power users” who kept trying to one-up each other with how distraction-free they were living:

These kinds of stories reminded monks just how hard it was to stay focused. They weren’t expected to be concentration machines. They too would come up short every now and then. “Acknowledging that upfront is a kind of compassion,” says Kreiner. “Monks are really good at being compassionate to each other, and to how hard it was to really follow through on stuff.” Freeing ourselves from distraction is really difficult. We don’t have to feel awful about not always matching up to our lofty goals.

And finally, in a short read Mandy Brown talks about the importance of Between-time:

We live in a world full of distractions but short on breaks. The time between activities is consumed by other activities—the scrolling, swiping, tapping of managing a never-ending stream of notifications, of things coming at us that need doing. All that stuff means moments of absolutely nothing—of a gap, of an interval, of a beautiful absence—are themselves absent, missing, abolished.

If I had to find a thread through all these pieces, it would be this:

• Not every moment needs to be filled with work that produces output. Cal Newport calls this working at a natural pace: “one with more variability in intensity than the always-on pace to which we’ve become accustomed.”
• Everyone gets distracted. Have some grace for yourself, and others. And try to distinguish between “distractions” (filling time with stuff) and “between-time”—those real breaks that we all need but get so little of.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post Meetings for an effective engineering organization, I bring you more meeting content! In You can’t just cancel 76,500 hours of meetings Becky Kane makes some good points about the context of meetings within an async culture:

Reducing meetings is just one piece of creating an async-first culture.

She gives some examples of other pieces that are harder but even more important in having a lasting impact on engagement and productivity:

• Decentralizing decision-making so people don’t have to wait for permission and deliberation before acting
• Delineating clear areas of responsibility so people feel individual ownership to move work forward

You can read the post for the other examples, they’re all very good! As with most of these kinds of topics it’s really valuable to think about them not in isolation, but as a system. It’s not about whether meetings are good or bad, it’s about how meetings fit into the culture and system of planning and delivery that the organization operates in.

Becky’s illustration of what “async” really means is a perfect example of this:

It seems like the topic of meetings is on everyone’s minds again as we start the year. Will Larson has some good perspective from the engineering org viewpoint:

Some engineers develop a strong point of view that meetings are a waste of their time. There’s good reason for that perspective, as many meetings are quite bad, but it’s also a bit myopic: meetings can also be an exceptionally valuable part of a well-run organization. If you’re getting feedback that any given meeting isn’t helpful, then iterate on it, and consider pausing it for the time being. It may not be useful for your organization yet, but don’t give up on the idea of meetings. Good meetings are the heartbeat for your organization.

He goes on to recommend six core meetings for every organization to start with. The “weekly team meeting” is one I’ve become a fan of as well. Getting the entire team on a call every week has the potential for being a giant time-waster, so getting the purpose right and facilitating it tightly is essential here. For us, the purpose is:

• See each other’s faces at least once a week. I wasn’t sure if the team would feel like this goal is a waste of time, but it absolutely is not. Since we’re all remote, “let’s just chat for a bit” is such a great way to start the week.
• Discuss blockers/issues. This is not a status meeting where everyone goes around the room and tells us where they’re at. We have an agenda in Google Docs that anyone can add to. The goal is to bring up any issues that the team is struggling with so that we can all figure out the best way to help.
• Company updates. This is also the opportunity for the leadership team to make sure the entire team has all the information and context they need to do their work effectively.

There’s one more thing about this that I highly recommend: every meeting is facilitated by a different team member. We have a schedule that we cycle through with a clear guide on what it means to facilitate—and of course, an option to opt out. This keeps the meetings interesting and everyone invested.

Previously, on meetings:

• When meetings are outlawed, only outlaws will hold meetings.
• Things they didn’t teach you about Software Engineering.

This is an interesting interview with Richard Culatta, author of Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World. They discuss how to help kids bridge the gap between physical and digital spaces, how to model good technology behavior, and more. This is such a good point:

By focusing on screen time we miss the far more important concept that we should be teaching our kids; screen value. Some digital activities are just not a good use of a kid’s time (eg. playing a repetitive, luck-based game) while others provide much greater value (eg. editing a movie, creative writing, FaceTiming with a grandparent, etc.) And context is important to consider too. Digital activities that are appropriate on a long car-ride will likely be different than those on a beautiful spring day when friends are around, or the day before a large school project is due.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that is something that not only kids need to learn. We can all benefit from this lesson:

The most important lesson we can teach young kids is to recognize that some digital activities provide more value at some times than others. This means evaluating each digital activity on its own merit based on the circumstances.

We should probably also remember that controlling children’s behavior with screen time leads to more screen time:

Researchers investigated the impact of parenting practices on the amount of time young children spend in front of screens. They found a majority of parents use screen time to control behavior, especially on weekends. This results in children spending an average of 20 minutes more a day on weekends in front of a screen. Researchers say this is likely because using it as a reward or punishment heightens a child’s attraction to the activity.

I agree with Bruce Daisley in The Death of Hybrid Work Is Greatly Exaggerated:

The focus for organisations in 2023 shouldn’t be on mandating a return to the office, but on working out how to build strong cultures in a new, sustainable way. Some of that is about optimising the time that teams spend together, curating rather leaving it to chance. If we’re to get the best out of work culture then we all need to accept that this is the moment to reinvent the construction of it.

It’s a common criticism of remote work that it’s more difficult to collaborate remotely. But I think this is the conventional wisdom only because we try to recreate the office experience for remote work. Since offices rely on synchronous interactions, we use the same lens to try to make remote work effective, and that’s just not going to work.

If we optimize for asynchronous communication instead—which is what remote work is so good at—collaboration can be extremely effective. Perhaps even more effective than office collaboration, because everyone can provide thoughtful responses on whatever topic they are discussing on their own time. As Brian de Haaff points out in Remote Workers Are Outperforming Office Workers—Here’s Why:

Without being able to lean on physical proximity, remote workers must reach out to one another frequently and with purpose. This leads to stronger collaboration and camaraderie.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, this has been my experience as well. As long as we shift the way we think about collaboration away from the office mentality, and use the right tools, I don’t think remote collaboration is less effective than in-person work at all.

Good post by Vadim Kravcenko on Things they didn’t teach you about Software Engineering:

Although it may sound surprising, the primary focus of a software engineer’s job is not writing code but rather creating value through the use of software that was written. […] Elegant code, best practices, smart solutions, design patterns — these are done for the sake of your fellow software engineers who will work on the codebase after you rather than helping you fulfill the purpose of bringing value.

And speaking of meetings:

It’s all interconnected, and the meetings are where the information is shared. As a software engineer, you are responsible for some part of this information sharing, so it would be irresponsible to hinder it. You might not like it, but the information must be shared for the system to remain efficient.

Here is a good articulation of why I wasn’t as enthusiastic about the Shopify meeting cancelation thing as most everyone else. Something felt… off? Here’s the Raw Signal team in When meetings are outlawed, only outlaws will hold meetings:

But the long-term fix for bad meetings isn’t no meetings, it’s competence. If you run a bad meeting, you need to fix the meeting or cancel it. But if you run a company full of bad meetings that need annual reboots, you need to fix your management team. Because while collaboration, alignment, decision making, and unit cohesion can all happen outside of meetings, well-run meetings are a very useful and effective place to accomplish those things. Taking that tool out of your management toolbox might be prudent if you don’t trust your managers to use it without hurting themselves or others. But it would be better if they were competent.

Also this:

Running an effective meeting means being opinionated about what it is and isn’t for, and fierce about not wasting the time of your invitees.

→ Context: Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke Tells Employees To Just Say No to Meetings.