Are you in the “Zone”?
June 18th, 2007
Being productive in this information age is really hard. As we have access to abundant information and communication channels, it is hard to concentrate on one task with full productivity. Initially these information and communication channels acted as assistants to our daily work life, but now they are our biggest interruptions during our work life.
Even in our 8 hours office routine, we don’t work for full 8 hours. Think about your startup work environment where it is critical to work for 14 hours a day to achieve more in less time and with less resources. Let it be your startup, your homework assignment, or your work in office – interruptions are bound to kill our productivity. Interruptions are our worst enemies.
On the same note, I recently read few interesting insights from successful entrepreneurs. Here is what they have to say –
Here’s the trouble. We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into "flow", also known as being "in the zone", where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone.
The trouble is, getting into "the zone" is not easy. When you try to measure it, it looks like it takes an average of 15 minutes to start working at maximum productivity. Sometimes, if you’re tired or have already done a lot of creative work that day, you just can’t get into the zone and you spend the rest of your work day fiddling around, reading the web, playing Tetris.
The other trouble is that it’s so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers — ESPECIALLY interruptions by coworkers — all knock you out of the zone. If you take a 1 minute interruption by a coworker asking you a question, and this knocks out your concentration enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you’re in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone.
With programmers, it’s especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can’t remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed.
– Joel Spolsky at Where do These People Get Their (Unoriginal) Ideas?
Also, read this –
When you have a long stretch when you aren’t bothered, you can get in the zone. The zone is when you are most productive. It’s when you don’t have to mindshift between various tasks. It’s when you aren’t interrupted to answer a question or look up something or send an email or answer an IM. The alone zone is where real progress is made. Getting in the zone takes time. And that’s why interruption is your enemy.
Set up a rule at work: Make half the day alone time. From 10am-2pm, no one can talk to one another (except during lunch). Or make the first or the last half of the day the alone time period. Just make sure this period is contiguous in order to avoid productivity-killing interruptions. A successful alone time period means letting go of communication addiction. During alone time, give up instant messenging, phone calls, and meetings. Avoid any email thread that’s going to require an immediate response. Just shut up and get to work.
– 37Signals at Alone Time
Well, its high time now that I should get back to the “zone” and get things done.
You all have a super productive week ahead!
