"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration."
I've never heard of or been part of any organization (academic, non-profit, corporate, open source, etc.) that respects the basic need of developers for uninterruptible concentration.
Note also that it is a particular word choice by Knuth: uninterruptible ... not uninterrupted. It harkens back to what Paul Graham wrote in both Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule and in Great Hackers -- even just having a mid-morning meeting on the calendar at all can prevent you from even attempting something hard at the start of your day, because you know the time is already interrupted.
You need more than just happenstance of not being interrupted in a given time window. You need to know that you can't be interrupted, at least not unless it's a sky-is-falling kind of emergency (and you need to be able to trust that your colleagues know the difference).
This is far and away the number one thing I need as a developer. I can write passable software that I'm not proud of if it's loud, violently anti-privacy, over-saturated with "collaboration" generally in some ultra-Agile open-plan nightmare setting. But the only times I've ever written software that I was proud of -- software that made huge, huge differences in the organizations I was part of -- was when I could finally find a loophole or something to create a situation when it was not possible to interrupt me with the usual bullshit.
It amazes me that even still, status effects and incredibly poor understanding of where the value of software engineering resides leads to so many organizations that not only have interruption-is-the-norm open-plan disasters for offices and a million Agile meetings, but actually praise that garbage and hold it up as if it is an example of positive collaboration or effective engineering, despite it being the very antithesis of positive collaboration or effective engineering.
Very true. I hate being interrupted when I'm programming. I'm fortunate that I work alone (except when my wife comes into my office). I think programming is a Zen state of concentration. Either that, or the trance that programmers get in, is a type of hypnosis.
Einstein's wife was forbidden from entering his study.
Oh, it isn't just me!
My wife doesn't understand why i have a horrified look on my face whenever she opens my office door to look for something or pass through.
I actually think understanding of this sentiment has declined over time. It's been around with a name since the days of the Jargon File (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hack-mode.html), but the general trend seems to be towards not supporting it at work or realizing how universal it is among programmers.
I'm not quite sure why; I assume it's partly that software development is less unified these days, and perhaps partly that day-to-day coding is way less stateful than it used to be. If someone is juggling register addresses all day, I imagine they'd be especially quick to condemn interruptions.
I think psychological flow [0] is the more general framework for this -- even outside of programming. It's not that understanding is declining, it's that programmers don't do a good enough job of demanding healthy working conditions. The rise of start-up like physical work spaces is an encroachment by those who extract wealth from our labor -- pushing the envelope as far as they can and taking more and more concessions, not just in terms of wages that don't keep pace with expensive cost of living implied by the urban centers where you're more or less required to live in order to work, but further by making basic physical workplace health an issue of subordination and sublimation -- signalling loyalty by being willing to suppress your human needs and requirements.
In other words, people aren't ignorant of this, they just won't care unless programmer labor makes them care, and programmers seem especially bad at sticking up for these kinds of things.
The problem is how to make a company care. If you say you quit unless you get your own office they'll say "Good riddance, even if you're a great dev and we'll have problems replacing you, we don't want someone who's not a team player."
Most people are social creatures (including most programmers I've met), if asked they will tell you they like to share a room with several others. It's fun, it's "collaborative" and there can be a hearty banter going on or whatnot. It's the cool thing to do because all cool startups do it! And they are team players!
So now if you come along and say you can't work under these conditions, your coworkers will think you don't like them and your managers will think you're not a team player. So in order to have any possibility of success, all programmers need to be on-board.
Now this is difficult because bringing the subject up may cause your coworkers think you don't like them. Then they'll say they rather sit together, and they want to be team players, and that having their own office with a door they can close feels like a privilege they don't deserve, and that closing the door feels like you're not being social, and that they don't even remember what it's like to be in flow (if they ever have). And that it will be too expensive for the company if all devs have their own room. Never mind the loss the company makes due to devs working (much slower) in interruptible mode. The problem is that that loss is not easily quantifiable.
My own experience is that I'm much more productive when I've had my own office and had the possibility of long stretches of working in flow. But whenever I've brought it up with a manager they've brushed it off as anecdotal (even though I've brought studies that say the same thing) and made me feel greedy for wanting the privilege and prestige that comes with my own office even though I care nothing about prestige and the only privilege I want is to be allowed to work in flow because that is a marvelous feeling.
> Most people are social creatures (including most programmers I've met), if asked they will tell you they like to share a room with several others.
I think this is actually false, both anecdotally and when surveys have been collected.
No one actually thinks you're not a team player just for desiring minimally healthy conditions. They are fully aware that you are probably a great team player, especially if you care about your teammates getting healthy conditions too.
The "not a team player" buzzword is just a political tactic to find a plausible excuse to discredit or eliminate you, despite you having a justified point, before it ends up catching on with colleagues. It's an HR code word for "we need a blank check excuse to impose our will while thinly veiling our dictatorial approach with some democratic plausible deniability" -- nothing more, nothing less.
Coworkers also will rarely care -- they want privacy too! As for managers making you feel greedy, that's just more of these psychological manipulations and tricks. They know full well your request is healthy and reasonable, but need a way to both look like they are high status and reject it at the same time, so they must invent ways to make your request look low status.
> I think this is actually false, both anecdotally and when surveys have been collected.
Yeah, me too, I guess I was a bit vague with the "if asked" part. I meant if asked straight to their face when others (possibly) managers are listening. There are exceptions of course but in my experience most people see it as a potential conflict with coworkers and managers and will not support it publicly.
> No one actually thinks you're not a team player
Yeah, I know, poor choice of words. But I meant basically what you said. It's shite politics in play. The cost of an office is a very concrete number in a spreadsheet but the loss of productivity is hard to gauge.
I have a small office in a large closet upstairs that I use at night for work, my SO has a converted room downstairs as her office for her home business, so there's not a lot of cross traffic. Unfortunately, that means she IM's me quite a bit, which since it's even lower cost than walking 20-30 feet if she's already at a computer, I'm not entirely sure isn't worse. :/
I frequently work from home and coworkers pretty frequently IMs me. Maybe I overthink this but I don't dare to shut off my IM (or mail either for that reason) in order to have uninterruptible concentration on a task because if I'm not responding to IMs quickly enough my coworkers may get the wrong idea about me working from home. The company supports it and most of the time I'm much more focused working at home, but when I'm in the office I frequently hear comments about other coworkers working from home like "Oh, (s)he's working from home, well, it is a beautiful sunny day today * snicker *".
Why else would you want a private home office? If you don't have a significant other, there's no need for a separate private space.
In my case, I work from home two days a week, and I have children. I separate space is essential to get work done. It's a matter of having a private space that allows me to be home if needed, and save time for with my family, or not being productive enough to make it economical for the business to allow.
I was trying to express that I am envious of people who are able to have a significant other and a comfortable home with space. Having even just one of the two sounds like a dream world to me.
This is why many devs work odd or late hours. To avoid the commotion of an active office. Every office has at least one person who abuses the communication channels. E-mail -> Calls -> Texts -> At your desk inside of 30mins asking "Hey did you get my email about <trivial thing>?"
The problem is you still have to show up and be an unproductive body in a chair during normal hours (especially if you work for a "progressive" company that talks a lot about how you don't need to keep regular hours) in order to get status points and be seen working. Then you have to stay late or work extra remotely to get the actual work done. So then you're just trading the productivity loss of an unhealthy, poor workspace for the productivity loss of unhealthy, poor hours, fatigue, and burnout risk.
I agree with most of your sentiments. Unfortunately Agile is getting to be a pretty watered down term, but in theory a bunch of "Agile meetings" is very against the whole meaning of Agile. Agile suggests "standups" because you're supposed to actually stand at the meeting, get tired, and go back to 'getting shit down'.
Question: if the point of an "Agile" standup is to share status and keep abreast of what is going on, why does it have to be done synchronously, at some always inconvenient time?
Could everybody just send a chain email with their "this is what I did, this is what I'm doing, here's my roadblocks" rote answers. Takes two minutes to type up, thirty seconds to read, instead of having to go stand around and listen to people ramble on for half an hour, with yet another meeting slicing your time into ribbons.
I don't think it's an 'either-or' proposal though. You're contrasting 'here's my ideal asynchronous system' with 'horribly long rambling meeting at the worst time.'
Here's my company's typical morning, for example:
- Arrive at the office. Catch up on email, Basecamp, maybe do some code review, that kind of thing.
- Have a stand-up meeting that lasts ~ 5 minutes, where developers and product people discuss what they are currently working on, any blockers, things that they anticipate will be needed from others etc.
- If there are any issues that require further discussion, agree a time or channel to discuss them.
It's great. Everybody is fully aware of everything that's going on, who's working on what, and any upcoming issues. It takes basically no time and serves as the launch point for the day's work.
I appreciate that it doesn't always work – may be more of an issue for teams that are geographically distributed. But I also absolutely see it working really well in practice, so I'm suspicious of reasons for discarding the idea so easily.
In several jobs all using Agile, with experienced Scrum masters and lots of training, I've never heard of or witnessed a stand-up actually lasting the allotted 5 minutes (they always run way over and never contain info that I actually need to be present to hear about) -- not even when it was a team of just four people. It's simply unrealistically averse to human nature.
Hmmm, during my last contract my shortest daily stand-up with an oversized team (14) was in fact four minutes: we held it around a restaurant table right before dishes being served :)
PS: It took 4 minutes because one of the team members was new - her first day with us ...
I have very infrequently had a standup run over in ~5 years of daily stand-ups; if it does (rare), it's because we've discovered an issue that's going to stop the team making progress immediately and needs to be dealt with. They almost always contain relevant info from the team I am working closely with.
I have to wonder the environments in which people are working where this is not the case. Is it just that the teams are too large?
I don't doubt your experience. I'm just saying that my experience has been violently the opposite -- for both large and small teams in large and small companies, all of which had done extensive training about Agile and had used Agile for a long time. Also, and this is not an exaggeration, literally every software colleague or contact or friend I know also has had the experience I have had.
We acknowledge there are amazingly rare companies like where you work that don't suffer from this -- but they just seem to be so, so, so extremely rare that they don't really factor into any true understanding of what "Agile" means in practice at the overwhelming majority of companies.
Also, in almost every case our standup meetings went on too long because people talked about irrelevant things, personal anecdotes, weekend plans, etc. Many times they thought what they were saying was relevant, but it wasn't. Scrum leaders were often the ones doing this the most.
Over time it basically fractured the team into two groups:
(1) the "boy scout" group who wanted to appease the Agile process and look like good, obedient workers, and so never minded the irrelevant and time-wasting meetings and acted chipper and happy to engage in all things Agile.
(2) the disillusioned and burned out group, for whom (over time) the irrelevant banter of stand-ups became like having someone grind your eardrums with sandpaper, and led to frustration, lack of energy to participate, and resentment, and a ton of turnover.
I've seen this dynamic develop in a lot of companies too. Sadly, the answer they usually come up with is a sort of Agile eugenics: let the people who get understandably frustrated by Agile leave -- regardless of how much experience in the company they have, how critical they are to their team or product, or how good they are. And then change the hiring process to screen virtually solely for Agile enthusiasm and end up shifting the workforce to a pro-Agile monoculture -- and then, regardless of whether it's objectively true or not, declare victory and talk endlessly about how much more productive you are now that you are uniformly Agile.
It doesn't really matter that it takes almost no time - it's that it is an interruption[1]. You're working along on something, getting in the groove, then Outlook dings at you , so you've got to page out the real work that you're doing, recall the silly scrum answers you're supposed to give, get up, walk over, wait for everybody to show up, blather on about things that you don't care about and already know because you've read the digests from source control checkins and ticketing, say your piece, and escape. Half an hour or more is blown away, plus another half hour to get ramped up to where you were before this all started. Oh, and by the way, somebody surprise-scheduled a customer demo or {InsertOtherMeetingWithNoDefinedAgenda} for you in an hour. Might as well just get coffee and browse the internet, and accept that normal working hours are for looking like you are working, so you can actually get something done later when everybody has gone home.
Stand-ups are only an interruption if they are poorly scheduled. I accept that sometimes it isn't possible to schedule one, such as when there is a large, geographically-distributed team. However, I have rarely seen them take place outside of the first 30 minutes to one hour of the working day, in cases where teams work on-site. This works really well in my experience, offering a little bit of time to get set-up for the day, a stand-up near the beginning to catch up and exchange status, then an uninterrupted rest-of-the-day.
To be honest, it sounds like in most cases I've heard of that teams are just undisciplined about interrupting developers. I obviously agree that interruptions are bad, but I've had great experiences (like my current team) when the standup serves to consolidate all interruptions – there will be no surprise customer demos, unexpected interrupts or other things of the sort, and part of the 'social contract' of the team is 'we will have this short meeting to keep us all up to date, and in exchange we will prevent developers from being interrupted'.
> I've never heard of or been part of any organization (academic, non-profit, corporate, open source, etc.) that respects the basic need of developers for uninterruptible concentration.
What do you think is the cause of that? Could it be because organizations aren't led by people who've experienced this problem themselves? Or do they just fail to prioritize it?
Certainly there's a need for quiet periods. There's also a need for periods of communication. Could it be as simple as dividing the day further, where X hours are reserved for no-communication time? Or, providing a separate no-interruption room for those who want to use it? Or is it just a matter of building trust with colleagues, as you say?
Perhaps voice these sentiments within your company. If nobody says anything, how will they know?
Being expected to check your emails is an interruption.
Someone entering or leaving past you is an interruption (this is why open plans and shared offices of any sort don't work well for tasks requiring open ended concentration).
I don't actually believe that most people understand these issues, they don't understand the difference between the simple menial tasks, the small steps of implementing little details you've done a thousand times, and the large leap to actually keeping your mind full of a problem to solve.
I think many organizations only pay lip service to the idea of valuing productivity. The management and executive layers have all kinds of opportunities for weird forms of rent seeking based on status, often boiling down to viewing their subordinates as a collection of pretty office decorations or the human equivalent of trading cards. They talk a lot about productivity, but actually don't care to consume productivity out of you, so they don't want to pay any costs related to productivity.
Staffing up for an acquihire event is a form of this. Designing a gaudy open-plan office with ridiculously opulent amenities yet no privacy is a form of it. Even the long-known fact that physically attractive people get hired, paid, and promoted more than equal-or-better performing, less attractive colleagues is a form of it.
Yeah I hear you on the "short term thinking" mindset of management
I think there is something intangibly great about making something that is built to last, and that some people don't recognize the value of such a thing
Best of luck finding an environment that suits you. You will!
I've certainly never seen a large organization that is consistently good about this. What I have seen, and valued enormously, are side-channel concessions to this need.
One of the better formulations is having lots of small conferences rooms (or corner chairs, or anything isolated) that anyone can grab, with bonus points for doors. It's not a complete replacement for respecting flow, but it's a great way to let people with some urgent, complicated code task get a truly isolated setting to get things done. A lot of everyday code can be written passably in counterproductive settings, so even occasional, high-urgency access to good workspaces seems to be a huge step up.
Actually, I think the bookable conference room or slightly private cubby/carrel "solution" is terrible and is a form of explicitly codifying disrespect for developer needs, which is itself a form of codifying the fact that business values more how you look on paper, your credential, and your appearance in the office than your actual labor product.
It also leads to problems where you receive status penalties in the eyes of peers and managers if you are the weird guy who always books conference rooms. It also creates problems if you work in a situation where you cannot move your workspace. For example, I also consider it to be absolutely basic to have at least two 24-inch monitors, my ergonomic keyboard, ergonomic desk chair, and trackball. Why should I be forced to use poorer tools, like a crappy laptop screen, portable mouse, crappy conference room chair, etc., just to get quiet or private space. It's unreasonable to give up either adequate equipment or adequate privacy.
In some jobs, I've also worked with large workstations and needed to be physically present at them, remotely logging in to them was not always feasible for some tasks.
Finally, you end up running into booking conflicts all the time. And anyone with more seniority or status than you gets to kick you out (thus interrupting you hugely and ruining your plans) and anyone with a meeting gets to kick you out. And it also leads to artificial scarcity -- there's no need for coworkers presumably working towards the same goal to be competing with each other for the scarce resource of blocks of spacetime in conference rooms. It's outrageously cheap and easy for the company to provide all of them with adequately private conditions.
Allowing a super generous work-from-home option is maybe a better solution -- as long as the company is also willing to pay for you to have equipment in your home office that is equally as ergonomic as what you get in the company office. But then you're contending with different kinds of status issues for not being physically present, some jobs still require a physical presence for various reasons, etc.
The minimal acceptable solution is for companies to simply spend the money that it costs to provide healthy amounts of private working space and give employees more autonomy in structuring how they work with regards to private time. No half-assed compromise should be given even the slightest legitimacy as a workable alternative and no company should get any credit for anything other than the minimally healthy option of actually providing access to private conditions.
p4wnc6,
I am trying to get in touch with you. The only contact info I could find is the email address on the "newcastle" site. Please let me know if there is a better way to contact you.
+ 1 on this. It reminds me to the two systems that Daniel Kahneman talks about in his book: Thinking Fast and Slow. The human brain is only good at multitasking simple things. You can only perform one complex task at a time.
I think it depends on what your emails contain. They can be stressful, challenging problems, or simple ones. For me, the longer I am at an organization, the less stressful communications become, assuming I've built good relationships.
It's the first period that's tough to get through. You're getting to know both the people and the business, software architecture, or whatever the job entails. During that time, we often blame email because we get email from strangers. Make the strangers friends, and email becomes a lot easier.
> They can be stressful, challenging problems, or simple ones. For me, the longer I am at an organization, the less stressful communications become, assuming I've built good relationships.
I like to communicate with customers always short and to the point via emails, because I value my and their time.
But with friends, I like to write more interesting and funny emails, that takes me more time. But because they are my friends I am willing to spend it.
Writing those mails to friends takes more concentration and allows more reflection about them and myself, in order to express myself correctly and in a nice way.
I would see the culprit more in todays Twitter culture, where people are force to write short messages without much reflection.
Maybe even the onscreen keyboard in most smartphones are another reason. Nobody wants to write more expressive messages with them.
> But with friends, I like to write more interesting and funny emails, that takes me more time
That's interesting that you find being funny more time consuming. Some people would say work/business/math is harder than humor.
You've proven my solution wrong. I can't think of anything more to say other than "some emails are easy, some aren't". And then, there will still probably be someone who says all their emails are a challenge, like Don Knuth, lol
> That's interesting that you find being funny more time consuming.
With my friends and family I am more willing to express my feelings and opinions on subjective close topics where correct expression is more difficult. At least for me, that takes measurably more time than just stating facts or expressing opinions on more objective topics for customers (and sometimes friends, for example to organize an evening together).
Adding some business politeness just have to fit some template, is very unpersonalized and, I find, easily done.
But of course there are some difficult letters to write to business contacts to, but I would call them very self-reflective.
I think people like Knuth are more hand-written letter types, were someone is forced to reflect and to go to "the bottom of things", because the act of writing itself takes more time. But I think that it doesn't matter that much about which medium is chosen or how long it takes to generate the messages, because the persons that are generating those message chose how much time they are willing to spend on each subject. Forcing it though the medium might enforce a certain standard, that could help some people or is more bothersome for others.
Huh. I find it much easier to be verbose. I've sometimes shared a laugh with colleagues when explaining,
"Sorry, I didn't have time to write a short message".
Condensing / distilling something complex into its most-concise essence is a valuable skill most of us would do well to acquire.
When I was studying in the early 2000s, email wasn't a problem. I went to check my email at the computer centre on campus twice, maybe three times a day.
With smartphones, I probably check my email 40 times a day. It is very distracting, but you have to keep on top of it for work. I'm sure it gets in the way of more meaningful thinking and has ruined my attention span.
If your job is to answer email, that seems reasonable. But if you're a programmer, I can't see how you'd need to check your email more than once an hour, or maybe half hour. Otherwise you'll never actually be programming.
If you're a programmer, your primary task isn't churning out code; at least for me, an important part is to first understand the customer or user's wishes, and second to make sure my colleagues are up to speed and aren't blocked by, for example, missing some knowledge that I possess. Mind you, most of that is done in person, not via e-mail; the Knuth comment (which I'm probably extending to your statement) seems to be about any kind of external influence, including emails, PRs, slack messages, people, or whatever.
That's fine to isolate yourself from that if you define your own problem and solution for it and work alone, but really, how many people do that? That's a thing reserved for idk, university researchers and people with their own projects.
Anecdotally, switching back from an iPhone to a flip phone has been very revealing for me. I don't know about all the generalizations made in this piece, or decrying overall social change. And I expect I am an outlier as being far more distractible than most.
But I do think it's worth spending a week living your normal life but without a smartphone to see how you personally are different. Don't just go on vacation and "disconnect". Try living your life but disconnected. It's interesting. You have to get places earlier. You have to make plans that have pre-arranged fallback plans. You have to have something to think about to not get bored. (Or, at least, I do.)
Part of the draw of smartphones is that many of us are terrified of boredom. I view boredom as an asset: it's when I get to introspect.
My happy medium is to carry my smartphone (I need it for work) but I turn off many notifications that are not essential, or make them more discrete (eg. in notification center but no sounds).
People also feel very guilty for not filling every waking moment of their time with some task. I can spend a weekend doing nearly nothing and not feel an ounce of guilt. I won't do it every weekend, my house would fall into disrepair. But sometimes you just need that weekend off.
Indeed. This is what learning Buddhist and Stoic philosophy has taught me.
Doing absolutely nothing but staring at at river for hours on end reconnects me with the world. Hearing and feeling the world around you without distraction is grounding. Coming back to the electronic world after that really shows you how crazy and hectic a world we live in right now.
Worse how? When I'm "on the sauce", I pull out my phone to idly check Facebook, Instagram etc for the 3 minutes I have on BART or 2 minutes while waiting at the grocery store. I don't get the sense those make my life any better. If I didn't check then, the same stories would be surfaced later when I'm at home. If I know I'll have more than 10 minutes downtime (like riding the bus) I'll just bring a book/Kindle.
I've also noticed that when I'm not constantly looking at my phone, I notice more interesting things around me.
Why not just uninstall those social apps? There are lots of things that can be done on a phone without wasting it on social media. Things like language learning, listening to a podcast and the like.
At the rate FB is going, I can see an uptick in people not willing to install messenger, etc. either moving away from social apps or finding other alternatives. For me, if they force the change on iOS, I will definitely be cutting back.
Honestly, most people don't care. The only reason my SO doesn't use the Facebook app is because it kills her battery too much to be able to use Instagram later on in the day...
As of today, I can't read messages on m.facebook.com any longer - instant redirect to play store/messenger, no way to access messages after going back.
> I've also noticed that when I'm not constantly looking at my phone, I notice more interesting things around me.
This is so true. It boggles my mind how much cellphones have made it normal to just sit and stare into a screen while there are so many things going around in the real world around one.
I usually enjoy what I check on my phone. A book or a Kindle is a pain to carry compared to reading the same thing on my phone (which I do do, via the Kindle app).
That's how I imagine it would be for me. I don't use social media on my phone at all, it's either used for communicating (voice or IM), or I'm using it to read an article or comments here (but I very rarely reply using it. It's frustrating at best). I view my checking of HN on my phone as distinctly different than social media, because I'm not checking because the feed is engaging, I'm checking looking to some specific engaging item to them settle into and digest.
I have a smartphone, but no mobile data plan. I am always reachable on the phone (mostly because some people I care about really disliked that they could sometime not get in touch with me) but a lot of the time if I'm out, I don't have the internet. Being connected all the time makes me a into a person I don't like as much as the one I am when I can actually disconnect a bit every day. There a "zone", or maybe a rhythm, I get to when I'm walking outside where I can focus on myself or in whatever I'm working on. It's much harder to get here when I know I could be on the internet instead.
It's not the middle ground I'd chose in an ideal world - I'd rather not have a smartphone, maybe not even a dumb phone, but I develop for mobile a lot.
The reason I like small smartphones (3.5-4 inch screens) is similar to this. It's a middle ground.
I won't argue that a 6.5" screen is great for doing stuff on, and you can more comfortably do more stuff on it than on a hand sized device. I'm just not sure why you'd want to.
I think this goes the other way: the use case is still so compelling that you try to do on the 3.5" phone what you would normally do on the 6" phone, and then just get frustrated by the subpar UX.
I just did a road trip through southern Utah with the explicit goal of not using any turn-by-turn navigation. It requires a little more up front planning, but if you reset your trip odometer at each major turn, it's just as easy as following navigation. It also felt good to not be dependent on the navigation.
This is true in the countryside, but in populous regions, smartphones with their traffic data and ability to reveal sneaky routes stand to really enhance the road adventuring experience.
I imagine the roads in southern Utah are somewhat different to the UK. The best comparison here, whether urban or in the countryside, would be a plate of spaghetti.
I am actually worried about myself for spending too much time with the smart phone. Even at the bathroom, while I stand peeing I browse stuff that I actually don't care that much about. It is a compulsion. Probably should get treatment. I find that I've started to lose the ability to read and concentrate on longer pieces of text. I hardly read books anymore, which goes into things at any depth.
I used to take long walks where I thought about difficult problems and found solutions. I would ponder these problems on the bus, or subway. I never mined being alone with my thoughts before. I never understood how people could be bored when there are so many things one could be thinking about.
Yet here I am in 2016 incapable of being alone in my own thoughts for more than 5 minutes before pulling up the iPhone. I starts to feel more like a bad drug, than a usable tool.
If anybody has good suggestions for phones or ways of configuring the iPhone so that I can only read email. I am not addicted to email. It is the browsing functionality which is so addictive.
I also wish I was not wasting my time on HN writing this comment ;-)
I suggest mindfulness meditation. 20 minutes a day of trying to focus on nothing can help get your brain back in order. It may seem odd that the cure for the inability to concentrate might be concentrating on something as basic as your breath. It worked for me. Mindfulness in Plain English is a good book to get started is and free online.
I read the first two sentences, and then I immediately closed the tab. I then decided to give it a second thought seeing the response on HN, and I see my first gut reaction was correct.
I'm 27, and I know people who are younger who surprise, surprise are reflective. I stay about 45 minutes away from my office by bus. By bike it takes 35. I like the bike ride, but initially, I missed the bus rides because I had time to contemplate on the bus...yes, with my phone in hand. May be I am the minority, but even with my phone I think a lot because I decide to and to be honest, my phone isn't as interesting as my thoughts...frequently. Technology has always been an augment to my life, it isn't my life. When I didn't spend 5 hours on my phone I probably spent 5 hours playing video games or 5 hours doing something else. This feels like another thinly veiled $(echo Rock and roll is corrupting the youth | sed 's/Rock and roll/Marijuana/' | sed 's/Marijuana/Grunge Music/' | sed 's/Grunge Music/Video Games/' | sed 's/Video Games/the Internet/') argument--it also is another article that indirectly targets Millenials ( attacking the selfie, then the tweet ) and that their culture is "unreflective"...yes, the same generation that drinks, smokes, is more educated, and has less teen pregnancies than prior ones. Possibly, some of those 5 hours were spent self-inflicting one's self with cancer in generations past, which I would argue is quite unreflective.
The phone and the internet is not going away, many introspective introverts like me still do think and still like it. Just because we have written language, it doesn't mean the corrupt youth know less since they no longer have to memorize. In fact, as Aristotle was dead wrong on Newton's 1st Law, I offer that written language, like all technology, just makes us better thinkers...it all comes down to how we use it.
Agreed. The article speaks more to the awareness of the author than the collective awareness of the public.
Every tool will be used by people however they choose. Tech can enhance or lower intellect. It's how you decide to use it that matters.
Collectively, I'm not convinced this age is becoming less aware of itself. There are some awesome things out there. Creative, artistic things in all walks of life. I have my own list of things that won't apply to everyone. It just depends what you like. If the world isn't producing something that you think should exist, then make it. I suppose, for this author, that is this article.
Smoking (or drinking) is horrible for many reasons. Being unreflective is not one of them. You could even consider it as some kind of meditation. I also think the comparison with the rock and roll argument is totally wrong. When the older generation complained about r&r they did not adopt it as the current old generation has adopted smartphones and the internet. When somebody of 40 years compare current and older ways of life has a good grasp of both of them. That said, I totally agree with your last paragraph.
I'm the same age as you and while I generally agree with your thoughts on the subject, I do see some merit in the article.
Personally I've noticed no lack of ability for people our age to reflect, even if they use technology to assist with that. I would argue that for most people today's tech does make it easier to find an alternative to deep introspection or thought. However, the availability of an alternative does not mean it is necessarily chosen.
I think the flaw in the article is to assume the visible public output of tweets and selfies is fully representative of an individual's thoughts and introspective activities.
Active reflection on past experiences has many positive effects on psychological wellbeing and I'm quite surprised that they weren't mentioned in this article.
Artie Konrad (disclaimer: a labmate of mine until he graduated recently) focused on the effects of Technology Mediated Reflection (TMR) which deals with user's keeping a sort of personal diary and being prompted to reflect on past experiences routinely. Overall this increases mental wellbeing significantly with some interesting effects on how memories are evaluated over time and how the reflective process affects current moods.
I would expect the opposite - ruminating over past problems will make them worse. It clearly does for some people, but you're saying it's different for other, do you know where the distinction lies? If you ever find out please send me an email. Thanks!
Great question. Their result in this area did surprise me. Conscious reflection on past negative memories slowly turns them into less negative and less painful memories. There is a lot of work here done by Pennebaker about how writing about past negative events transforms our memory of them [1]. And the work done by my lab started off with a system that facilitated these reflections through technology [2]. There is more recent work on this in press.
I think the difference lies in the structure. Rumination is symptomatic of depressive thinking and often characterized by intrusive negative thoughts. Reflection on the other hand is the conscious process of sitting down and reevaluating a past situation (often in writing).
1. Pennebaker, J. W., & Chung, C. K. (2011). Expressive writing: Connections to physical and mental health. In H. S. Friedman (Eds.), Oxford handbook of health psychology (pp. 417-437). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
2. Isaacs, E., Konrad, A., Walendowski, A., Lennig, T., Hollis, V., & Whittaker, S. (2013). Echoes from the past: how technology mediated reflection improves well-being (p. 1071). ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466137
> I think the difference lies in the structure. Rumination is symptomatic of depressive thinking and often characterized by intrusive negative thoughts. Reflection on the other hand is the conscious process of sitting down and reevaluating a past situation (often in writing).
For a constant ruminator like me, learning to properly reflect has improved my life more than almost anything else.
I came to realize that I either suffered from intrusive thoughts that remained vague, oppressive, and kept returning in full-force, or I pushed the thoughts away by constant reading, activity, or various intoxicants.
But if I sat down and wrote unfiltered, or just more actively allowed myself to 'fully' observe the situation including the thoughts and emotions that came along, they would often start to untangle by themselves. Not always, but often enough that it really made me a happier person.
There are things that don't untangle themselves, and for that I'm seeing a therapist. But they're doing basically the same kind of thing (CBT-based therapy).
Meditation/Mindfulness might lead you to some more insight on this subject. It teaches to observe pain when it comes up rather than ignore it. The book Mindfulness In Plain English is pretty good. Or, Tuesdays with Morrie. Observe emotion, then let it go.
To the scientific mind, mindfulness might seem hokey. I certainly thought so for years until I saw it promoted on HN with some scientific research backing its efficacy. Then I tried it and was impressed with the results.
I get constantly distracted at work by people asking me questions, needing something etc. My solution has been to leave the office and go for a walk. No one knows where I am and I get to think quietly to myself while walking.
I have my phone with me and I just leave it in my pocket.
This whole question of what to do with one's mind. Introspection sounds nice but it's not always useful.
What I'm kind of trying to do with technology is study or learn for many hours every day, it's just that I'm not doing a great job, because the stressful approach makes it hard to find and approach real valuable material.
I'm also trying to keep up with some kind of professional community as well as some cultural forms of community. I appreciate the professional or hobbyist communities because basically they don't revolve around Donald Trump and I can pretend the world is basically sane.
I've reflected a lot but not really gotten anywhere. I really value two different three month periods in the past few years when I haven't had internet access at home at all, though. Having hours every day when my mind wasn't hooked up to high frequency information systems was pretty wonderful.
There's something in Bob Dylan's memoirs, the first book which is the only one I read (I don't finish books anymore), about how his "news" for a while was the history of the Byzantine empire (or something) because that's what he was studying at the time.
I'm more and more interested in the visceral feeling of "offline" and I think it's a source of refreshment that is becoming scarce (this ought to be a considerable driver of interest in meditation retreats).
> Having hours every day when my mind wasn't hooked up to high frequency information systems was pretty wonderful.
I feel like this is what many people would describe as a period of introspection. You are temporarily closing out far away communications and narrowing focus to immediate surroundings.
You can get more of this by focusing on one object, or closing your eyes. If you do it for 20 minutes a day, you might find yourself more capable of handling other stresses. The skill is currently called being mindful or aware, and you can strengthen it, as you observed, by closing out externalities. After closing your eyes, the idea is to close out thought. It is a challenging and useful exercise. There are some books on mindfulness that could say more.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. This might not be everyone's cup of tea, but this is certainly a valid idea.
Tangentially, I've thought about resetting my phone once a month to make sure I only have installed what I want/need. But as a first step, I disabled 23 notifications I didn't need -- kept just SMS and WhatsApp.
The thing about the way the human mind works is that you often can't find out what would be most rewarding, or why you are acting as your are, good or bad, unless you spend some quiet time slowly paying attention to your unclear feelings and various experiences.
Meditation can help a great deal with this, ditto keeping a journal. So can engaging in artistic expression such painting or writing poetry. Ditto reading great thinkers or novelists. I particularly like the focusing method developed by the philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin.
You have to understand, social media corporations don't want you to know what you really want, because it often would turn out to be something other than what they are selling. So they keep you distracted with mental candy and an unending worry that you are missing something important.
The last remaining place I’m guaranteed to be alone with my thoughts is in the shower.
Teddy Wayne clearly hasn't discovered LifeProof cases.
When I first got a LifeProof case many a friend received a photo of water coming out of the shower head and the words "just having a shower".
But anyway, yeah we spend too much time on our phones. But so what? There are much worse things. Out of the 20 or so <25 year olds at my work place only three of them smoke cigarettes. Who cares if we use our phones too much. If we go to work, pay the bills, and generally don't get too involved in fucking people over, do whatever you like on your phone.
At least smartphones are interactive, at least to some extent.
> Teddy Wayne clearly hasn't discovered LifeProof cases.
Tangentially related but I hadn't discovered LifeProof cases prior to you mentioning it. These things look amazing. I'm ordering one for my phone right now. Less for using in the shower (I take really fast showers) and more for using in the rain and not worrying about an accidental drop in a puddle.
(And maybe I'm the outlier here but I don't want to go back to having a not-smartphone. I remember using flip phones like my StarTac as well my complete tank of a Nokia 3390--complete with Snake--but I also enjoy being able to e-mail and text with my friends and read books and play music all from one device. And I'm in my mid-30s so it's not like I've never lived when we didn't have smartphones.)
I wanted to check my phone less, and one thing that helped was setting the screen to grayscale (iOS: Settings > General > Accessibility ). When things are less shiny, you're less inclined to compulsively have a look. Tip from The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/480240/adventures-in-...
When I want to reflect, I go for a drive. It takes me through places I don't see every day, and ensures I keep my hands off my phone. When I get home, I will have cleared my head, and I often feel I just had an adventure.
It also works just as well to leave your phone at home and go for a walk. We existed for a long time with just landlines; you weren't at home when Bob called? That's fine. Just because we _have_ cell phones, we're not required to be accessible 24/7.
The single best thing you can do for your productivity and peace of mind is leave your phone on airplane mode unless you are expecting an important call, or need to make a call. Anyone trying to reach you that you actually want to hear from will leave a message, and the hassle of having to switch out of airplane mode keeps you from compulsively surfing, using facebook/twitter/etc.
I've found that the act of logging out of Facebook after using it generally has the same effect. If I find myself casually loading Facebook, but it takes me to a login screen, I remember that I wanted to be purposeful about using Facebook and put it away.
I removed all social media apps from my phone. I will still occasionally access them from my laptop now but usually when I'm using my laptop I'm working so the temptation is a lot weaker.
Two observations: first, I would probably underestimate my smartphone use by the criteria they provide. It wouldn't occur to me to describe checking the time as 'using' my phone, but it would count, because it turns the screen on. I'd guess that half the occasions I turn my screen on, it's to check the time.
Second, I easily use my phone for five hours in a typical day, because I like to listen to music. But listening to music is no barrier to reflection or introspection at all, rather the contrary, at least for me.
Maybe I reflect less now than I did before I had a supercomputer in my pocket. I am not certain. However, today I have more and better information to reflect upon than back then. Of that I am certain.
When I turn off, tune out and drop into a book it's more out of the habit of an older generation than some quest for a quality inaccessible to the well wired. I don't think that being wired has made people less contemplative so much as it facilitates encountering those who aren't now and would not have been in the past.
Agree that reflection and contemplation is important.
Likewise, writing your thoughts out is also powerful and sometimes, being forced to edit your point down to one or two 140 char snippets is not such bad thing either.
Similarly, being exposed to the views of people you would likely never meet in pre-internet/social media times is no bad thing either IMHO.
"Everything in moderation" and "Variety is the spice of life" are aphorisms that persist for a reason.
We were writing out our own thoughts before the internet and also cutting the length down(see graffiti, sms).
Being exposed is not the same as being constantly bombarded with new content. By the way, you're not really being exposed to that differing views as Google, Facebook, etc are putting you inside a bubble filled with things you like.
Moderation is hard when companies are working hard to make you use their tech as much as possible (more looking, more clicking -- more money).
So increased smartphone usage may be impairing our reflective abilities, but to play devil's advocate, what is it imparting instead which is beneficial? As the article notes, a thought may be tweeted out to others instantly and developed in a public forum instead of in isolation in the thinker's head. That may very well result in better thoughts, particularly for people who never had very complex ideas in the first place.
For the last few weeks I've been not listening to podcasts or music on my morning walk to work (half hour). I deliberately did this to give myself time to be more introspective or creative. Realizing after X minutes that you've just been lost in thought is kind of satisfying.
The only problem I have with my feature phone is the fact that it has opera mini which is capable enough to write this comment. On the first week I broke the email when trying to update it. Facebook on the other hand is kind of interesting. it takes 2min to send a message.
"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration."
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html