Getting S*** Done I: Focus & Pomodoro

Role models can be found in many places. One of the most influential people for me was Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an Indian astronomer who revolutionized astrophysics and also had one hell of a work ethic. I could write an entire blog post on the things he did and how they’ve effected how I look at work and life (and perhaps I eventually will on my personal blog), but for now I want to focus on just one aspect of his career: his ability to partition work and effectively get things done.

According to K.C. Wali’s excellent biography, “Chandra,” this two-time Nobel Laureate learned to divide up his days, with set times for research, for being editor of the Astrophysical Journal, and for all the other tasks that come with being a University of Chicago professor. The segregation of tasks was said to be strict, and the poor sod who made the mistake of coming to his office at the wrong time would be bluntly turned away.

N.B. In this post I’m going to talk about how individuals can do things to improve their productivity. In the next post, I’m going to talk about things for teams working together.

Why focus matters

Today, research shows that this kind of attention to focus would have made Chandra significantly more efficient than our typical multi-tasker, allowing him to get more done without working more. There are several reasons for this. First of all, switching between tasks takes an amazing toll on efficiency. Additionally, in fields like astronomy the language we use for different aspects of our work is sufficiently different that code-switching also has an effect on our work. Let me try and explain both of these factors.

The American Psychological Association has an excellent review of multi-tasking research on their website. This article lays out several different factors at play, and how something as simple as going regularly between two different tasks – however familiar they may be – creates a cognitive lag in which your brain has to go “Oh, yeah, now we’re doing this other thing that uses this other set of skills.” This cognitive lag is separate from the time added while you literally switch tasks (in research environments this time can be zero’d). Our brains are little biological filing cabinets, and it turns out there is actually a set amount of time required – a few tenths of seconds – for the brain to change which rule-set it uses to govern actions. For instance, your brain uses one rule set to write prose and another to write software, and while your computer may instantly  ⌘-tab between an email and your IDE, your brain is going, “Hold on – What computer language is this? Ok, found it… You can go ahead and type that document.write() statement now.” In addition to the time required to switch rule sets, the brain also needs time to switch between goals. This is the part of my brain that likes to fail a lot; I’ll switch tasks and have no idea why I made the switch; I might open a new browser window to post information on Facebook, but the fact that my new goal is to post something often gets lost in the switch. In true mutli-tasking – in trying to do two totally disparate tasks – this kind of goal switching might mean you actually stop walking when you start trying to type a text message… or stop paying attention to the road while driving and texting (don’t do this).

It’s easy to say someone is multi-tasking when they’re jumping between writing a research paper, prepping for class, and filling out the myriad of university forms graduate school never warns you about. What’s harder to see is the more subtle multi-tasking that comes from having to code-switch. The term code-switch originally referred to the act of multi-lingual people jumping between languages in their speaking or writing. More recently, the term has been used to also refer to how people switch between formal and informal or dialect ways of communicating, such as when African Americans switch their language and mannerism from what is portrayed in movies like “Straight Outta Compton” to instead mirror white, middle-class mannerism you might see in “The Martian.” In research, the concept of code-switching has been applied to looking at efficiency in tasks like ordering coffee at Starbucks. If, like me, you are incapable of saying “Venti” and always say “large”, you are forcing the person taking your order to code-switch, and there is an efficiency penalty. (Similarly, if you order a “two cheeseburger meal – no cheese” it is more efficient than ordering a “two hamburger meal” at McDonalds, because the default is cheese burger). In astronomy, the language we use when we’re talking to our research colleagues, to peers in other departments, and to our students are all different languages. More than once, I have found myself struggling to speak like a normal human after spending a day writing grant proposals or research papers. Things as simple as switching back on the part of my brain that uses conjunctions can take a minute. This code switching is just another form of multi-tasking and comes with it’s own penalties.

Overtime, all the tenths of seconds (and more than tenths of seconds) lost in multi-tasking can add up to massive loses of productivity. Chandra knew what he was doing when he said, “Come back during office hours.”

This rigorous dividing of time is something I actively try and work toward, but I admit I fall short of the mark on more days than I’d like. In this post I’m going to try and overview some of the things I’ve found that help (and call out the drawbacks some of them also suffer).

Coordinating the Chaos

Life is filled with interrupting requirements. One of the greatest banes of productivity is the telecon (a topic for an entirely separate post). They require a focus shift at a specific time, and that time doesn’t care if you happen to be utterly focused on some highly productive task. The same is true of teaching classes (which I am actually a fan of doing).

I once read that effective people try and schedule all their meetings for the same day. Faculty long ago learned, it is kindest to their research if they arrange to teach all their classes on the same sets of days (e.g. M-W-F, or T-Th), and use their other days for research. This bundling of interruptions means that you can carve out larger chunks for focused activities on other days.

Within CosmoQuest, I have worked hard to confine all of our collaboration meetings to Tuesdays. Similarly, Fraser and I are working to move all of our recording to Fridays, so that we can be more efficient (and so I can more readily be on the Weekly Space Hangout). Monday is the day I hide at home and work on writing tasks and research I’m working on by myself (I have some side social media research projects). Remaining time during the week is used to beat down to-do lists while working with students and colleagues … and for telecons.

This bundling of activities helps the big picture – I have made the purposeful decision to hide on Mondays so I can work without interruption, and to bundle activities as best I can through the rest of the week so less switching is required. This isn’t perfect, but it helps. (Especially on Mondays.)

Moving forward, I’m hoping to propagate this time bundling habit through the CosmoQuest team (as well as schedules will allow). We’re getting ready to hire a bunch of students, and I’m going to make every effort to have all of our CS kids working at once. I have quiet fantasies of all of our education team people working on the same days (hello Learning Space Wednesdays?). If it’s Friday, it’s collaborations with Fraser. This will never be perfect, but together I hope we can bring back just a little bit of sanity.

Mental Breathing

I’m not going to lie; software orders me about like a (mostly) obedient golem. My life is shaped by a series of beeps and flashes. Alarms tell me to get up. They remind me to stop and think about stuff like dinner. Buzzes are often a source of, “Hey you- Go do this calendar event,” but one specific set of chimes is also used to keep my brain focused and the distractions at bay: these are the chimes associated with my Pomodoro software. While I would never say, “Everyone needs an alarm to remind them to go to bed,” I do think everyone needs to know about this productivity technique that comes out of the Agile development community.

The Pomodoro Technique, is simple: Find your self a timer, set it for something like 25 minutes. Work. When it goes off, set it for something like 5 minutes and take a break. 

People forget that breaks are important. In fact, for a long time, people didn’t even research their importance! One of the first papers on this (explained well here), was published in 2011 and talks about how the human mind will actually lose focus on a specific activity if attention isn’t periodically drawn away (or allowed to break away) to something else.

When I’m writing – like right now – I know I’m capable of hyperfocus and those alarms remind me to come up for air. Left alone, I will keep writing until done (or called for dinner), but my writing will actually get worse (as in more typo filled) the longer I work

The “Pomodoro Technique,” is a productivity hack that structures your day into a series of short sprints and mandated breaks. Classically, it’s a cycle of 25 minute sprints and 5-10 minute breaks. Research by the Draugiem Group, however, looked at the time-usage of the most productive employees and companies using the productivity app Desktime, and found these employees tended to work in 52 minute sprints with 17 minute breaks. Personally… I vary my durations according to task, mood, and fatigue levels.

We all have those days when it would be nice if everything just went away. These high stress, or somewhat depressed, or just otherwise hard-to-focus days are the days when I have a 25min:5min cycle, and during those 25 min cycles there is a small voice in my brain saying, “You can do anything for 25 min. It’s ok. You can get a snack when the buzzer goes off. It’s ok. Go skritch the dog after this… You. Can. Do. This.” And for 25 minutes I don’t drift out of the window I belong in. When that buzzer goes off, I core dump and just take a break. This technique allows even my worst days to still be productive.

On the other side, days when I can totally focus I use 50min:10min cycles so that my ability to focus doesn’t actually wreck my productivity (this feels like irony, but it’s actually neuroscience).

Summary: Putting the pieces together

Ok, this was long. Did you tl;dr? That’ ok. Here’s a summary:

To be productive, you need to come at things from two directions.

• Avoid multi-tasking; it does very bad things to productivity. If you can, find ways to partition your week so your disruptions (telecons, classes, etc) are all lumped together, and leave you nice clear swaths of time to try and work.
• Remember to take breaks. Breaks are not moments of multi-tasking. They are moments of letting your brain reset so that you can maintain your focus. Do this purposely.

I’d like to also highlight a couple fail modes.

Let’s talk about email. Email is seriously evil because of the assumptions people make about it. Our profession has gotten into this mode of “everything must be emailed, and all responses won’t be immediate.” Help end the madness, and just say no. Find parts of your day that are the email parts. Ignore email otherwise and turn off notifications except from people who require immediate responses. As needed, give backup ways (Slack, SMS, etc) for key people are allowed to interrupt you to get to you without forcing you to open the great time suck that is your inbox.

Let’s also stare at our work climates. It is entirely possible you work somewhere that gives you no freedom and forces you into horrible situations. I’m becoming a pretty good leader, but I’m a truly terrible boss. Need vision? I’m there. Want someone down in the trenches leading the charge? Sure! Need day to day management? Well…. I have a ways to go. On Thursday I realized I was interrupting what my what my brand new project manager was doing every time I realized we needed to add something to the to do list. I wasn’t giving him information on priorities, and I was causing task switching. I was evil and I wrecked his productivity. Our business manager (shared across a bunch of programs) lives a life of people constantly coming into her office and interrupting her and changing her priorities. This is her job, and as far as I’m concerned she has magical abilities because I know I’d never get anything done if I was her. Sometimes your work environment is designed to do everything it can to break your productivity.

Coming Up Next

Now, I have to admit, on Friday I worked really damn hard not to be the terrible boss I was on Thursday, and to instead be a colleague working together to do all the things. In the next post, I’m going to talk about what I’m learning about managing collaborative teams and how we can support one another’s success and productivity with simple things like Kanban boards, and remembering the importance of playing games.