"Deep Work"

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I had a shithead boss many years ago that you guys don't know who ta-taaed any mention of needing to get "in the zone" to code and solve problems. I see it called "Deep Work" now. This guy messed me up a bit as it was his belief that anyone at a senior enough level in IT should be able to quickly and easily snap in and out of this mode.

I think now it's mostly bullshit (the guy was wrong about everything else, so why not that) and I believe it's a skill to get into that zone and tune out distractions, like any other skill. And it works best when practices.

What do you guys think? What are your experiences getting "into the zone" for mental work?

[Casual Observer]

I make phone dials and surf the internet all day so no

[AArdvark]

It's very important to be able to visualize the toolpath when writing a program and it does take a few minutes to get in that head space. Other people talking in the room is detrimental for me as I automatically start listening to them instead of focusing on the code. It's definitely a practiced skill to see how things are going to work at the cnc mill when all you're looking at is a bunch of numbers.

[RealNC]

I was in The Zone just now but still decided to fetch coffee and read this thread. Now I'm like "wait, what was I doing and why the fuck did I write this line just 5 minutes ago..."

The Zone is real. Now I have to start juggling those 10 interconnected things in my head again from scratch. It takes a while. And that's what The Zone is. Juggling.

[Tdarcos]

needing to get "in the zone"... it was his belief that anyone at a senior enough level in IT should be able to quickly and easily snap in and out of this mode.

He's an asshole who has never done creative work or probably even developed a spreadsheet. Becoming laser focused - what is normally called "being in the zone" and now has this ridiculous and unnecessary euphemism - is a special mental state which you only get through sustained concentration on a task. When you get there, it's fantastic; everything works, it all flows and the work becomes effortless. But to get there requires an environment conducive to concentrated thinking: quiet areas (or possibly one's favorite music); uninterrupted time to work; and proper resources (today, being a programmer or knowledge worker doesn't just mean Internet access is a nice perk, it is absolutely essential to do one's job. While a good programmer knows his/her language and tools, the APIs, functions, objects, methods and data formats are often too vast for a person to keep all of them in their head. Sure, I can write SQL, but if bit's anything more complicated than SELECT, UPDATE or DELETE, I'm almost certainly going to have to look it up "Do I do a RIGHT JOIN or LEFT JOIN? What format do I use for SELECT on Oracle vs. MySQL vs. Postgres vs. DB2? )

I think now it's mostly bullshit (the guy was wrong about everything else,

Well, at least he has a perfect record.

I believe it's a skill to get into that zone and tune out distractions, like any other skill. And it works best when practices.

Right on both points. Any skill requires practice to learn it. Bad habits don't just "happen", they require regular repetition to reinforce them. All of the ways we have found to successfully develop software require we got our heads bashed in over and over by doing things the wrong way and discovering doing things the right way makes things easier long term, at the expense of a little extra effort short term.

Taking half an hour to set up a repository and copy files to it, then check those files out, and regularly commit them is a little extra work that seems pointless. Until you have to rollback a change that doesn't work. That becomes a serious pain without SCM. You might have to spend hours or days to go back to a working state. When you have source code control, rollbacks - or roll forwards, if you went too far back - are easy and painless. It makes experimentation cheap. If anything, I'm starting to realize that I don't "checkpoint" code on a project often enough; commits should be done every time you complete a correction that does not break the build.

What do you guys think? What are your experiences getting "into the zone" for mental work?

Executives have various perks, or as Mary Chapin Carpenter asks in Passionate Kisses:

Is it too much to demand... pens that won't run out of ink, cool quiet, and time to think? Shouldn't I have this? Shouldn't I have this? Shouldn't I have all of this...

Why do executives get these sort of perks? Because executives are supposed to think to have long range goals and strategy for planning what the business will do. Programmers do something similar; they think of ways to implement a solution to the problem they have been presented, and to figure out ho to develop future improvements.

No one would expect an executive to do good work in a noisy place where they're interrupted every five minutes with telephone calls and someone asking for something/ Programmers shouldn't be expected to do so either under the same circumstances.