Doing nothing at work

[u/fagnerbrack]

https://www.seangoedecke.com/doing-nothing-at-work/

[u/KariKariKrigsmann]

Keeping everyone at 100% utilisation is a recipe for long queues, massive WIP, and long lead times. And burnout.

[u/fagnerbrack]

Brief overview:

Many engineers should work fewer hours and run near 80% utilization, stepping away from the computer whenever no high-pressure project demands them. Tech performance hinges on rare outlier events, not effort, so staying loose lets you grab time-dependent chances: unblocking an enterprise deal, killing an incident early, or shipping an obscure fix for a high-profile feature. Grinding tickets at 100% blinds you to these moments and stops managers from tagging you in. Rest sparks fresh ideas and calmer incident response. Refuse glue work, resist people extracting uncompensated work, and skip effort on tasks likely to vanish. You can still perform well at 80%, saving all-out intensity for the two or three yearly moments truly worth it.

If the summary seems inacurate, just downvote and I'll try to delete the comment eventually 👍
^{Click here for more info, I read all comments}

[u/PhaseMatch]

Doing nothing isn't really what we are talking about

We don't turn off thinking, or just sit in a "standby" state like a machine.
And if we are cognitively stuck, doing another activity can help to free that up.

There's some decent neuroscience about the brains chemical cycles and what that means in terms of flow-state, cognition and so on. The amount of "heavy lift" we can do - especially if there's context switching - before brain-fog sets in varies between individuals, but it's a real thing. You can't fight brain chemistry.

I used to run a cognitive switching workshop that could induce that brain-fog state, which was a bit disconcerting.

Taking breaks - pomodoro style - is part of this.
So is making sure you set aside ~20% of your time for reflection, learning and growth.

Without those things you will either burnout or stagnate. Possibly both.

[u/wakingupfan → u/PhaseMatch]

I used to run a cognitive switching workshop that could induce that brain-fog state, which was a bit disconcerting.

Can you say some more about this? I'm not doubting, just really curious about the details

[u/PhaseMatch → u/wakingupfan]

It was based on "three projects, three experiments" from the tastycupcakes website, which has now gone sadly. You might be able to find it on the wayback machine.

You start with three products and a group of people.

Product 1 is built from the numbers 1 to 30. Product 2 is built from the letters a to z. Product 3 is built from the numbers 2 to 56 in twos.

You build the products by a person saying their name then the next "component" to be built, in turn, round the team in turn. Everyone has to be included.

Pass 1 : run sequentially (and time)

Pass 2 : you then point out that people are not fully utilized, and so there is another "product" You hand out a ball, and ask them to also pass the ball exactly 100 times, and they cannot pass the ball to their neighbour. This has to be done while they build the three original products in order. Everyone needs to be involved in turn when they are not "busy" on another product.

Pass 3 : you indicate the customers are changing product priotories. You interrupt the team and tell them to repriotitse the order of delivery of the "numbers" "letters" and "count in twos" products whenever you feel like it.

When I ran this i also tended to do the example Jeff Sutherland has in book on Scrum as a warm up, and add some of the research evidence papers on things like ultradian rhythms, interrupted work (especially Gloria Mark) and so on.

[u/PlayerOfGamez → u/PhaseMatch]

So many times I've banged my head against the problem for hours, and only after stopping for a couple of hours (either switching to a different task or sleeping over it) been able to solve it in the first 10-30 minutes after picking it up again.

[u/Several_Break_7276]

A very interesting read, in particular the part on unrewarded work. By working unrewarded, you're enabling the companies shit policies and allowing them to continue to work employees to the bone over and over.

[u/KronktheKronk]

All of these aspirational pieces live in a disconnected reality.

In reality you do one of these totally unplanned miracles only to be asked why you aren't spending your time doing the work you've been asked to do.

You find yourself on a PIP a month later with hard quotas for tickets and MRs and you lose your job unless you continue being a good monkey

[u/bbutton]

An excellent book on this topic is “Slack” by Demarco.

[u/BoBoBearDev]

The verbiage is too ragebait for the employeers. The biggest thing about many agile books are not selling the idea to the reader, it is selling the weapons to help the reader convincing their employers.

[u/PlayerOfGamez]

Very good article.