Ask HN: Does the company that you work for has a Deep Work culture?
github.com
github.com
Hahahahahahahahahaha no.
So many goddamn pointless meetings, approvals for everything, deployments, updates, planning meetings. Maybe I spent ~10 hour a week in meetings not counting the time that is lost waiting for a meeting to start and trying to get productive again after a meeting ends.
The proximal cause, in one word, is Slack.
To be more exact, it's a company-wide failure to manage the flow of information.
Say what you will about meetings, but at least in principle, the point of a meeting is to set aside some time to address a specific question. No one will generally come to you and say "I know we have a meeting scheduled on Thursday, but can you answer this question for me right now anyway?"
On Slack, anything can demand your attention at any time, regardless of how important it is or when it's due. Answering a quick question to get someone unstuck? Slack. A general question about long-term project planning that would be more easily addressed in an email thread? Also Slack. Support requests from other teams? Slack. Trying to get several people to agree on something? Also Slack, but pairwise instead of a group chat.
It's not that you can't turn off notifications from Slack. You can. It's that everyone at my company seems to treat Slack as a synchronous (or almost synchronous) channel, and has cultivated basically no filter for deciding what demands my attention now and what demands it by tomorrow. Everything is now.
A culture of deep work, for me, is a shared commitment to specifying how soon a question needs a response, and then respecting that choice. That translates into a heuristic for what to use when. Urgent support? Slack. General question or conversation? Email, with the expectation of a response within a day. If an email thread is longer than 2-3 turns: a synchronous group call. Don't @here in team channels. If someone needs to be on alert constantly, set up an on-call alias for them. It's not rocket science, but it does need to be woven into the fabric of the org.
P.S. The worst people are the ones who take several turns on Slack just to get to the point.
"hi!"
"hi!"
"can i ask you a question?"
"ok, what's your question"
"i wanted to ask you about <X>"
"what about <X>?"
"this isn't really a problem right now, but what about <XYZ>?"
Aaaargh!
> "hi!"
> "hi!"
On that point, one of my colleagues has this in his sig:
As a hiring manager I only want one person who is brazen enough to lead: any more will lead to conflict and any less will lead to chaos.
You don't want to rabbit-hole either and avoid getting any feedback or asking any help because you're too busy "deep working".
Typically from my experience the ones that crave deep working above everything else have the highest egos and are too afraid to have their ego broken by getting any feedback from customers or other developers so they hideout "deep working" for days developing features nobody wants.
It was just recently considered revolutionary and heretical to do this every 2 weeks, instead of quarterly or annually!