My friend Todd wrote about information overload and linked to this Seattle Times article. Is it possible to do good work when there are constant interruptions from inside and outside your head? When there is more interesting stuff in your RSS aggregator than you could possibly read? When friends and coworkers constantly interrupt you?

I would say that if you contrast my average and best work, this is one of the most striking differences.

At my paying work, I sit in a cubicle. I listen to music on headphones continuously because it covers up the noise of people talking around me, which is far more distracting. I believe this environment subtly discourages focused thinking. That is bad because in programming, a well-considered design decision can replace hundreds of lines of code—you can reach an equivalent or better solution with less work for yourself, your testers, and your successors; but not if you're never able to concentrate for more than two minutes. Consequently, there is a subtle, subconscious motivation to be a bad programmer. This reinforces the cultural misperceptions that programming is a rote activity and that programmers are commodity workers.* Another consequence is that any person not content with doing a mediocre job is urged to go into management. This makes the environmental problems self-reinforcing, because managers—whose daily business is primarily communication, not prolonged focus—both favor an interruption-friendly workplace and hold positions of power.

* Although I call the belief that programmers are a commodity a misperception, this isn't always true. In some cases, such as projects for which offshored development is successful, programmers are a commodity. If you are running a software development project, you should be honest with yourself about what you building and whether it's better to have a brilliant team or a cheap, mediocre one.

By contrast, in the programming I do in my spare time, I am rarely interrupted. I would estimate my average time spent focused is on the order of 5 minutes, with peak focus lengths of 30-60 minutes. By contrast, at work average time spent focused is probably about 2 minutes, with peaks of around 10 minutes. I focus more at home for a few reasons:

• I personally love the project.
• I sit alone, in my attic office with nobody around. Or I sit downstairs on the couch, but I can easily ask people to not interrupt me (or to stop interrupting) and they honor my request.
• I never have to wait for my editor or compiler. This means I am not given lots of 30-second gaps perfectly suited to going off and reading stupid websites.
• Because the edit-test-success/failure cycle is so tight, I don't get distracted enough to wonder if I have any email. So I reduce my checking from once every 5 minutes to about once every hour (I just instrumented my mail checker to measure this, so I should have real data to back this up in the near future).
• I don't have to work on it if I'm tired, upset, or preoccupied.
• I know the project better because I did most of it myself.
• Because I designed the software, I can understand its design and I don't feel held hostage to idiotic design or technology decisions. (I.e. I feel more ourness.)

Of course, not all of these are luxuries employers would want, or be able, to afford their employees. All the more reason to push the feasible ones.

Question for audience participation: Businesses are inclined toward productivity improvements that are measurable. I think businesses could realize productivity gains if they understood some of stuff I just wrote, but I don't know how they would measure progress. Can you think of a way?

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In this excellent post on Progressive Trust, Christopher Allen describes how trust develops between humans and how this meshes with technological notions of trust. When choosing how to divide our attention, we make use of numerous conventional credentials: are you at a professional conference I attend? Are you well spoken and polite? As we continue to interact, and develop a greater body of shared experience and understanding, we refine our trust in each other.

I'm a little surprised, though, that Christopher didn't mention blogs. What makes blogs (and the RSS-powered subscription mechanism) so powerful for getting you information you care about is trust. Specifically, you can think of a blog subscription as an indication of trust that some feed will contain items of interest. It is a rather coarse-grained indication of trust, but is quite effective. Especially when I the reader have my own blog, and participate in the common practice of linking and excerpting the especially interesting content from my subscribed feeds. When I do that, I am delegating trust—the trust placed in me by my readers can connect to Christopher because of the trust I have for him.

This is exactly what happens in social situations. Suppose you're at a party and meet someone new. What's the first thing you ask them? "So, how do you know Bob?" Now suppose you know Bob has despicable taste in music, but he makes the world's best cheesecake. You'll spend a lot less time talking with someone who answers "I played in a grunge band with Bob in 1992" than someone who answers "I'm a pastry chef instructor at the local culinary institute where Bob took night classes." This example, ubiquitous in our social lives, illustrates how powerful and adaptable trust is. Even without being consciously considered.

The amazing thing about blogs is that they can reflect this kind of nuance. Almost every blogger has a variety of interests, sometimes spread among multiple blogs, a blog and a livejournal, or categories within a blog. Furthermore, blogs cluster into communities based on shared interests, such that if you subscribe to any of the blogs in the community you are unlikely to miss any major news within the community. This redundancy permits individual bloggers to specialize in the details, and offers readers a chance to adjust who they trust, over time, as they learn more about their options. Just like if you're first interested in an academic field, you can work with any professor who's involved and learn a lot from them; but if you want to do a PhD thesis you'd better find someone who not only is interested in something you want to study, but is also easy for you to get along with.

Frassle, my blogging platform, is an attempt to emphasize and scale up the trust mechanisms already informally used throughout blogs. Another smart take on this situation is Robin Good's discussion of the NewsMaster.

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Here's a tip: If the building you are currently in is burning to the ground, go find the person with NADD on your floor. Not only will they know where the fire escape is, they'll probably have some helpful tips about how to avoid smoke inhalation as well likely probabilities regarding the likelihood you'll survive. How is it this Jr. Software Engineer knows all this? Who knows, maybe he read it on a weblog two years ago. Perhaps a close virtual friend of his in New York is a fire fighter. Does it matter? He may save your life or, better yet, keep you well informed with useless facts before you are burnt to a crisp.

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A lawyer's perspective.