Comment by monkeyelite
Comment by monkeyelite 16 hours ago
This is a great point and a lesson that has taken me decades. If you aren’t given quiet uninterrupted time the company is signaling to you that office time is about managing day to day fires, not deep work.
Often you need to protect time to get something done but they literally want you to be doing something other than writing 10k LOC.
At the most disruptive place I finally arranged it so I worked at home on Fridays and Monday through Thursday were used to answer questions, attend meetings, do shallow work and do exploratory work for deep work. For instance, you need to do a refactor for a new feature or a bug fix. Is the code going to just let you do it, or will this change require another, and another, and another to get things working again?
So most Fridays I knew exactly what I needed to do and I coded for a solid six+ hours. And having already poked around I typically got about twice as much done in that time as I typically would in a day.