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…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.

Joel Spolsky, software developer, Fog Creek Software from Where do These People Get Their (Unoriginal) Ideas?

Jason Fried from 37signals wrote at Vitamin about getting in “the zone” where you can shut down the world around you and focus on your work. He compares “the zone” with REM sleep, when your body really rests and recharge. Getting in the zone is not easy, and getting out of the zone is a snap. Just as before you get into REM sleep first you have to sleep, and any interruption would make you start all over again.

When you’re in ‘the zone’ you get your best work done. But how do you get in that ‘zone’ when colleagues, e-mails and IM are vying for your attention?

His suggestion, get a good amount of alone time when you can’t be bothered. This is when the real development magic will happen.

From Vitamin.

This entry was posted by JErm on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.