I've had more ideas come to me after hiding in my office to take a nap than sitting at my desk. It got to be such a gold mine of solutions that I still to this day allocate 30 minutes of my day to a nap. Non-negotiable. So many hard problems that have been brought to me, or complicated needs for architecture, etc were solved by simply turning my active brain off. When I was in graduate school I'd regularly get stuck on some stupid thing I didn't understand and slamming my head against the paper/book/whatever didn't help. Again, a quick nap and I was good (or at least better than I was).
Performative work is a disaster. I worked in a stuffy IT office of a company before I got my degree and became a software engineer. It took YEARS to deprogram performative work. I still hide when I take a nap. I suspect that if my current company found out I was sleeping on the job they'd still be upset with me. However, my output is so good the results speak for themselves. It would be difficult to fire me for napping.
The three fundamental ideas of my PhD came to while:
1.) Sitting in a park sketching solutions on a notebook.
2.) Laying at the beach on vacation.
3.) Playing Legos with my daughter.
Without these ideas, I doubt there would've even been a PhD, or even a paper publication.
(There was a period of 2 years in my life where I did not have any significant ideas, at all. During that time, I was employed at a company which offered a constant stream of urgent TODO emails and tickets. I worked until exhaustion for 2 years, but did not get any work done.)
Snap. Whenever I sat down to cast about for ideas on how to develop the initial form of my PhD, nada, zip. Deliberate concentration on one thing was a shortcut to procrastination.
The 'big idea' came when I was on campus, standing outside smoking. Hit me like a bombshell. I literally ran to see my supervisor, blurted out IT'S JUST A F**G MOLECULE, cleared off his whiteboard and spent the next hour sketching out what turned out to be another 5 years of work.
Those eureka moments are where true creativity turns up, I find it impossible to solve problems through dedicated, stare-at-the-screen thought, but I'll get a brainwave at e.g. the gym and nearly drop the weights on my head.
Companies need to promote creative problem-solving spaces, and I'm not talking about a beanbag area with free lattes, but a sit-and-think, light, non-social way of working that promotes this kind of thing. No idea how this could be done in practice, though.
I know the castration of ideas in the "Everything-is-an-Emergency" company culture. If you're not careful, it will condition you to delay work because the next "emergency" and shift in priority is imminent.
Yes, this is undervalued. It is called the diffuse mode of thinking (as opposed to the focused mode). Walk around in the park during lunch break is work, too.
I got an Apple Watch in the endgame of my PhD to catch all the thoughts I'd have out and about, particularly on runs. I rarely reviewed them and a lot was adrenaline-induced ranting and raving, but the act of documenting helped cement them better and drastically cut out the anxiety of potentially forgetting something really good.
David Lynch analogizes his sitting-with-cigarettes-and-a-notepad-to-catch-ideas to fishing. You can't chase after them but once in a while a big one will come along.
Many top novelists, scientists, engineers, etc., have come up with ideas doing something other than work. We’ve all had ideas at odd times and contexts. Sometimes good and occasionally outstanding ideas or solutions.
“Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces… Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one — well, at least one and a half,”
More to the point, there is evidence that a 10-20 minute nap at the middle of the day, such that you don't go into deep sleep, improves cognitive function and subjective alertness.
I'm the same except with guitar. I always keep a guitar next to my desk, and when I start getting frustrated or stuck with work I'll noodle around for 20 minutes. Usually I feel very refreshed after doing this. Working from home has been a godsend for me.
> I've had more ideas come to me after hiding in my office to take a nap than sitting at my desk. It got to be such a gold mine of solutions that I still to this day allocate 30 minutes of my day to a nap.
Many of the hard problems in my career have been solved while having a long warm shower in the middle of the work day.
In general, my own productivity trick is understanding and leveraging the Eureka effect. Your subconscious is still working on the problem when your conscious mind is doing something else. Often, if pointed focus doesn't work, just leave it in the back burner to stew. Then wait for the proverbial light bulb to show you the way, out of nowhere. It never fails, yet I have never heard anyone mention this phenomenon.
My empirical explanation is hard problems benefit from unrelated stimuli, so they're able to be approached from an oblique direction. In other words, to think out of the box, stop thinking and do something else.
Hammock Driven Development by Rich Hickey [1] is a presentation that dives into why taking a step back from the immediacy of a problem often leads to clarity.
Benjamin Franklin had this amazing idea of having ball bearings in his hand while solving and thinking about hard problems. The thinking would eventually make him fall asleep and as he fell into a slumber, the ball bearings would roll off his hands startling him up. It is at this precipice, the fine line between awake and asleep states that most of his ideas came to life. He would start penning down his ideas in this state.
So it worked then, it works now. A 20 to 30 minute nap during the work day has a ton of benefits, including stress reduction. I don't know why it is frowned upon. I have fallen asleep many times at my desk and have been made fun of, but who gives a damn. I would rather be stress free and have some good ideas come about.
>When I was in graduate school I'd regularly get stuck on some stupid thing I didn't understand and slamming my head against the paper/book/whatever didn't help. Again, a quick nap and I was good (or at least better than I was).
I remember doing this, too. I would often nap 2-3 times a day in crunch time and sleep less during the night, solving many problems.
I think the problem as you say is the performative part of work, and napping really doesn't look good in that sense.
Since COVID WFH I often also nap instead of eating lunch, which is a double power boost, since a big lunch can make you almost comatose.
During my PhD, I had a friend famous for having a pillow on his desk.
He would take a nap everyday and went on to finish his PhD 6 months earlier than all prognostications and with some great ideas.
At the grad school that I went to, senior grad students were offered a chance to move out of the lab and into a private "dissertating office" as they became available. With a couch I could nap on, an incredible window view to gaze out from, and a door I could shut for focus work, it was amazingly productive for finishing my dissertation. Those few months were the only time that I've ever had a private office and to this day I still rather miss it.
(And most of my favorite papers came about from ideas that I'd had while on vacation.)
> So many hard problems that have been brought to me, or complicated needs for architecture, etc were solved by simply turning my active brain off.
I get it that it works but wonder what could be the logical explanation of this. I remember this method was also mentioned in the movie Turner & Hooch.
My working hypothesis is that the conscious and subconscious mind cannot access the same part of the brain at the same time (sort of like bus conflicts). So, counterintuitively, to let your subconscious mind churn on a problem, you have to actively focus elsewhere. This, at least, seems to be how it works for me.
Not sure at all, but one thing that strikes me is when you’re purposely “thinking really hard,” you’re probably in a state akin to vigilance. You’re trying to assess ideas quickly and move to the next one. If you’re playing with legos, an idea can just sit there in the back of your mind and tumble about a little bit into different configurations and orientations.
I think another commonality is physical activity: walking, playing, washing. There may be some chemical thing going on with muscle activity but also subjectively I have a suspicion that these sorts of activities are essentially pumping noise into your cognitive processes, helping divergent thinking, while also keeping your attention sufficiently occupied to achieve the “non-vigilant” posture toward those ideas.
When you are focused on a problem your left side of the brain take over (thinking in worlds and steps)
When you relax, draw, daydream or sleep your left brain can take over and think in parallel, images, abstractions.
When you dream the constraint on your consciousness (simulation) are lifted to allow more divergent scenario. That’s why dreams can be a bit crazy.
It’s a bit like brainstorming on steroid, letting loose of more constraints.
This! The human mind never fails to amaze me, so often the solution to a work problem pops into my head right after waking up, without even remembering what I was dreaming about.
So, recent R&D into sleep tech has come along ways in the past 20 years. Basically research has shown that during nap/sleep cycles our brain moves around memories (from short-term to long-term and prioitization) and connections between memories. Also, this process optimizes information in the brain to make the access faster and more efficient thus providing opportunity for neuralogical advanced thought sessions given the datasets after a nap/sleep session.
Some basic take aways include +20% memory capacity per 8-hour sleep cycle and longer un-interrupted access to memory collections. It's also been shown that it's possible to tag the day's memories and then prioritize them during the next nap/sleep session. Significant results have shown that groups that take 30-minutes nap have stronger memory capacity versus groups with no naps.
The face of the R&D seems to be Matt Walker - PhD Brit with intense accent - you've been warned!
TL:DR - The brains basically recharges AND rewires during nap/sleep sessions.
Software development is creative work. Creative insight can come anywhere, any time. Better ideas can make difficult things easy. And make the impossible– possible.
So the most important thing on a software team (or really any team creating high technology products or services) is an environment where team members feel safe to be themselves– psychologically safe, where they can try out new things, make mistakes, fail, and not be punished or belittled. Say their ideas and have them improved by others, not criticized. It's an environment where team members take care of themselves so they can be creative– sleep enough, exercise enough, be with friends and family enough, play enough.
You have to be at your keyboard or lab bench or whatever enough to make things. But if you are there too much your creativity plummets. This is what I try to get across to my teams.
It seems that no matter what ideas I come up with for capturing creative moments, it becomes vastly simpler if I just use pencil and paper. But I have started finding ways to capture with tech in a low-friction way.
One of them is using the Voiceliner app during times where it's not convenient to write things down. It also forces me to express my idea in natural language.
Just FYI, you're being downvoted because generally on HN you should just upvote if you have a contentless agreement comment to post, AKA a "this"-style post.
These ideas are intuitive, but I can't find the research backing them. The blog quotes another blog [1] which claims research but doesn't reference it. That one uses a quote from an MIT article [2], which is a perspective piece with no actual experiments.
People use "research says" to add gravity to ideas, but it's important to share (and check) the sources.
Not sure that literature really contradicts the original hypothesis. The abstract (can't download the full text without buying it) seems to be implying that they found there is motivation for working in groups and made work more fun (or rather, even just providing cues that make people feel like they are working in groups) but didn't really touch on innovation or collaboration as it relates to brainstorming/ideation.
I think it's important as the poster above you said, not just take the word research at face value. I'm sure that there may be studies that show collaboration can lead to good ideation and outcomes also, I just don't think this one is that.
Some notes from the abstract:
> ... examined cues that evoke a psychological state of working together ... which increased intrinsic motivation as people worked alone.
> These cues also increased feelings of working together but not other processes.
> The results suggest that cues of working together can inspire intrinsic motivation, turning work into play. The discussion addresses the social–relational bases of motivation and implications for the self and application.
This is one of the most absurd, black-and-white things I've ever read.
Does innovation come from running, showering, lying in bed? Absolutely, no question.
But at the same time, when you get a diverse group of people to solve particular problems, they generally come up with far better solutions than any one of them would have on their own.
Because these are really about two totally different types of problems. The first "private innovation" one is often about finding a clever solution to a relatively well-defined problem that is "puzzle-like" -- math, code, chemistry, whatever.
The second "group collaboration" one is often about finding a workable solution to a relatively ill-defined problem that is people/organizational/product -- what is the right marketing campaign, right new product, right new vacation policy? Where the most valuable contribution is "wait, but have you thought of this?" or "wait, but if we do that <bad thing happens>" and everyone says "oh good point, I didn't know that was a constraint/solution!"
The obvious answer is that both are valuable. The idea that they are somehow at odds, or that only the first one is "work", is ludicrous. It's true that "individual contributor" jobs often fall more into the first category. But to denigrate the second category as "not work" is both disrespectful and, frankly, just idiotic.
> The obvious answer is that both are valuable. The idea that they are somehow at odds, or that only the first one is "work", is ludicrous. It's true that "individual contributor" jobs often fall more into the first category. But to denigrate the second category as "not work" is both disrespectful and, frankly, just idiotic.
But let's be honest. Most mantras try to force all work into the "group collaboration" bucket. If HR and other management-training groups value isolated work and individual contributions they sure don't show it. Literally every piece of training I've received about working effectively has been about collaboration.*
I think that's because most work training material is not really about innovation or productivity at all; it's about avoiding HR gaffes and workplace conflict.
*Don't get me wrong; collaboration is a superpower, and many ineffective work relationships I've observed were hampered by someone's inability to collaborate well.
> Most mantras try to force all work into the "group collaboration" bucket. If HR and other management-training groups value isolated work and individual contributions they sure don't show it. Literally every piece of training I've received about working effectively has been about collaboration.
I think that's because isolated/individual work is so obvious and default that there's nothing to train.
People know how to work alone. They often have to be actively encouraged to collaborate, however. HR isn't trying to force "all" work into collaboration, that's silly. But the right way to collaborate often isn't remotely obvious, when there are so many types of collaboration and so many different types of tasks/projects. So training makes sense and pays off here.
Group collaboration can rely on cleverness when someone builds a hypothetical on top of a set of assumptions that sound reasonable but contain elements that are foreign to everyone on the team.
And clever ideas often benefit from a round of annealing to smooth out corner cases and ergonomics. This can either be direct feedback or the result of asking questions about the solution, triggering the author to refine the idea while explaining it.
What the group is good at in your second category is precisely defining the shape of the problem. In my experience the solution is then still born from an individual's creative efforts, even during this group effort. I prefer the sandwich model of cooperation: get together to define the problem, separate to work on it, get together to review solutions, iterate.
I disagree, the value of a group is in keeping people grounded. That security person is going to overvalue security, that web person is going to overvalue the frontend and that cloud advocate is going to overvalue microservices.
But we have another name for that process, requirements gathering.
It's not work in any meaningful sense outside of it being something that needs to happen before implementation. But it's output isn't all that useful unless you ARE an implementer. And that's the rub.
The PROBLEM is that people love to talk and wax eloquent to show their intelligence and you get pulled into stupid conversations as a result.
I think design by committee rarely turns out well. However, listening to the groups response to an already working product/demo can be very valuable before the next release.
"The mantra of sharing your work and involving everyone in decisions naturally leads to inviting and copying people into things that add no value to them, or you."
Fred Brooks, in his book The Design Of Design, includes a section on "The Magic Power of Teams Of Two". In his opinion, large teams cannot get anything done, and most innovation comes from individuals, but Brooks feels that teams of two people are the sweet spot for innovation. You and one other person -- if that other person can challenge you in the right way, offer a different perspective, or fill in holes in your knowledge, then instead of slowing you down, they speed you up.
I personally have found that meetings of two people (me and one other person) are where all the most important conversations happen about solving problems or plotting strategy. I wrote about that in "Truly Agile development revolves around one-on-one meetings, not daily standups":
It often feels like “teams” of 1.5 work really well. Basically this is one person doing the work, with one other person who is very much in the loop but not actually on the hook. The worker is getting the job done, and the consultant is offering ideas, questioning some decisions, reviewing WIP, and generally supporting the worker. Having been on both sides of this, I think that the little bit of distance that the consultant has from the immediate problems of the job, while still having awareness of a lot of the context, can really accelerate the work.
Great insight! I always look back at my high-school internship at a real software company back in the 90's. I spent at least half my day sitting in the cube of the old unix greybeard (literally) just watching him code and once in a while asking what he was doing. It seemed like a waste of time, but 1) I became a really good c programmer from multiple summers of watching an expert, and 2) since I really wasn't in charge of typing, I had a second stack going in my head and when he would ask "what was the query we just sent to the database" or something like that, I'd remember and keep him going. So I think I helped him as much as he helped me.
I often try to recreate that with interns and juniors at my current job, but everyone is so anxious about not typing or not submitting commits they don't stay and watch me work. Plus I think I'm less comfortable with silence than my old mentor was. He didn't care if I was sitting beside him for a hour while he was quietly hacking away. I tend to feel the need to explain a bit too much about my thought processes.
I think you're onto something - I have a friend with whom I collaborate a lot where it feels like that. We're always working on our own thing, rarely on a truly shared project, so we're basically two "1.5 sized" teams. It's amazing
Once when two co-workers needed help with something I had more knowledge of, I sat between them so I could look over both of their laptops and jump in as needed. When a manager was confused about what was going on I called it "double-pairing" and got a funny look back.
The only way around those limits is to find a way to reduce the size of the project. Either cut scope, or find a way to write less code, typically with a more powerful programming environment.
I, personally, feel that instead of two it would need to be three to have a more diverse set of opinions and to break any stalemates. I've worked for many years with just one other person and the number of times where we had ideological differences and not enough exposure to alternatives are innumerable.
Yes, to be sure, I need to be more careful how I phrase this. I recently consulted with a VP of engineering who liked to bring 9 engineers together to review a database schema. I suggested more one-on-one meetings. He said, "Yes, I know you like less chefs in the kitchen." But that was not true, so I clarified with him: "I think it is great that you meet with those 9 engineers, but you should consider meeting with them either one at a time or maybe in groups of twos. The problem is that with nine people, on one video call, the conversation will either last 6 hours or some people won't be able to voice their concerns. There is a risk that the comments will remain at a general level. If you want to dive into the details, and surface the real risks of a given model, then hold smaller meetings. And really, the only purpose of those meetings is to surface the risks you face, so there is really no point to those larger meetings. Hold smaller meetings and surface the risk. But I am 100% okay with the idea of meeting with all 9 engineers, if you have the time to do that. Just meet with them in small groups. (And if you don't have the time to hold 7 or 8 or 9 separate meetings, then be strategic about who you meet with --- that is one of the most basic skills of leadership, knowing how to invest your time."
The one-on-one meetings don't always have to be with the same person. And of course, the particular person matters, some can be more of a hindrance than a benefit.
I can attest to this. Furthermore, teams of two make it more difficult to check out of a shared problem and allow the other team members to do the work, thus it improves the overall performance.
For the past 3 years I’ve worked in an almost 100% pair programming environment. It works wonders for a lot of problems, especially around “code ownership”. It’s much harder to get precious with your code, or point fingers at someone else’s code, when the responsibility for every line is shared by at least two people.
But I found that the pressure of pairing shuts down a lot of thought. Long silences are forbidden in pairing; you must vocalize your thought process. I found myself searching for gaps in the conversation where I could think for a second and blurt out my thoughts before it’s too late to turn the train around. I believe pairing can lead to local maxima this way because there’s no room in the conversation for deep thought.
I'm shocked you made it 3 years. I did a stint trying to do what they call "mob programming" and felt borderline suicidal. I couldn't think because I was constantly vocalizing what I was doing. Nothing added up and every ticket felt like it was just a hodge-podge of different ideas with no real flow. Lord help you if someone wanted to disagree. Now you have to completely stop your worker thread and handle that. There was no art to it. Its just one robot and two guys standing behind you ordering you to do this or that. I found it impossible to reach a flow state and produce actual good work. I left every session feeling like I accomplished nothing for myself. I am not attached to my code, but I am attached to my accomplishments. When all your work is atomized between people you are effectively no one. In this case, I believe, it's better off to leave.
Pair programming in moderation can be enlightening. Much like traveling to a different town as an artist to learn from other artists. Too much of it and you lose your identity. It is completely possible to remain detached from your work but still desire to work mostly alone on your own tickets. Code ownership is a silly concept. On one hand everyone suggests being detached from your work. Yet everyone simultaneously realizes having your name in a PR matters. I make a habit of crediting people who worked with me in the PR message. It's pretty simple.
I guess everyone is different and appreciates a different amount of collaboration!
I guess something ideal for me would be roughly 70% pair programming, 30% alone time - but I have not been able to test this guess because I have always worked on teams where pair programming is the exception, not the norm.
Were you required to pair? I'm always curious about this kind of arrangement, and fear that it can often be a sort of crutch, especially for more Jr engineers who don't yet have the experience writing a large amount of code on their own.
Back when I started as a freelancer, I initially copied the 9-to-5 rhythm of „working“. That, despite having viewed this forced window of work as one of the biggest annoyances that come with a job.
Over time, I could overcome this „weird“ feeling of not sitting at my desk while working. It went quite a bit like the author describes:
- Load up on context and information.
- Start outlining the problem.
- When stuck, try for a while. If no progress is to be made, go for a walk, do laundry, buy groceries. Stuff _away_ from the computer.
- When potential solution inevitably form in my mind, write them down wherever I am.
I often find that when I arrive at potential
solutions this way, I’m usually a lot more motivated as opposed to banging my head against the wall. It’s not only more productive, it’s better for your mental and physical health, it keeps you engaged and satisfied with your work. Many times I simply cannot wait to return to the desk to try the ideas out.
It’s also important to know when to stop. Occasionally there are days where I can get nothing creative done. I have learned the hard way that when I force myself through, more often than not I mess something up so terribly that I need at least half a productive day following up, rectifying what I broke. It may feel like cheating yourself at first but sometimes it’s better to just stop for the day entirely.
However, while employed, have you tried to go out for an extended walk or do something else away from your computer, outside of the building you are required to work in? Deciding to do so without permission can get you a citation and asking for permission leads to blank stares from your co-workers and managers. For many, that’s apparently akin to asking for paid time off whenever you feel like it. The conclusion here can only be that many employers are more interested in owning your time than results, whether they realize this or not. Which brings us to a larger point about work culture and insistence on presence at all times but that’s a huge, separate discussion.
> However, while employed, have you tried to go out for an extended walk or do something else away from your computer, outside of the building you are required to work in?
I'm 2 decades into my career amongst multiple different employers in different industries (including traditional stuffy ones), and I've never had anyone even raise an eyebrow at people wandering off for a few hours unannounced
if you're billing the client by the minute then maybe I can see why they'd get upset, but otherwise, as long as you're delivering, who cares?
I started working from home four years ago and I have less ability to step away from my desk now than I ever had working from the office. It got even worse in 2020 after most of the office started working from home. Not to mention that teams snitches on me if I am away from my computer for five minutes.
The company I worked for complained I was away for two hours during lunch. That's including, you know, driving somewhere to sit in a restaurant and wait for food. I quit after a month.
I was very lucky at a previous company to be able to do this - I had weekly or fortnightly meetings with the CTA, Snr Dev Manager and a few others where we would meet to agree strategies and issues.
Due to limited office space, very quickly these turned into 30mins to 1 hour walks - so each week I'd get 5 really impactful conversations with my peers, through the medium of a walk.
Sometimes the focus would be on connecting as two humans (which helped our working life massively) other times it would be totally work/problem focused. But the space away from the office, and with the privacy that came from being away from everyone else, we got loads done.
Really valued that way of working, I've tried to get it going in my current role, and had some success with Teams 'remote' walks with my last manager (each of us took our phone for a walk in our local areas) but for various reasons this didn't work out well for us.
Concerns like this are a big part of why you need to charge double your normal rate when contracting. You might not get paid for travel to and between job sites. You also aren’t working performatively so there’s little or negative value to padding your hours to match a 40 hour schedule every single week. Work 30 hours except during crunch time. Sharpen your saw.
I don't think so. It's basically just the tragedy of the commons. Most workers are responsible and a 20-30 minute nap/walk break would make them more productive. 20% will abuse it endlessly.
I think some would think they are abusing it and discover they benefit from it.
Someone who doesn’t nap at work gets home to find Season 3 of Ted Lasso has landed, stays up to watch it because they can just nap at work if six hours of sleep turns out to be a bad idea. But then they have a good afternoon because of the nap and decide to try it again.
I hear this argument repeatedly. What’s missing is the question _why_ said people do this. I feel it’s not sufficient to lump them together under “some people are leeches” and be done with it. I’d argue that if they had a meaningful responsibility, they wouldn’t bug off.
Because humans are social beings, we need to signal to the others that we belong to the group and are doing our part. Our loyalty is prized more than our effectiveness or efficiency. It doesn't matter how productive you are, the feelings of the group are more important.
You can see this in many places in our society. The security theater in airports don't make air travel that much safer, but it does send a signal to the group "look, we're doing something about it!". Same goes for the war on drugs, notoriously ineffective and seemingly only makes things worse. The hunt for benefits fraud is often not quite effective, hurts the ones that actually need the benefits, but the fear of the freeloader is big enough one must be seen to be tough on fraudsters. Or school, where doing what you're told is much more important than any learning you might do along the way. Or the way China is now burying itself with Xi's everlasting reign.
If you think humans are meant to be effective and efficient, you are very much mistaken. Everything we manage do, we do in spite of it.
While I agree with the overall point, that view of airport security and drug control being ineffective shows the power of Hollywood propaganda than valid points supporting the issue of the human condition.
One only has to look at places that value such measures to see they DO work.
Israeli airports for example or Singapore's drug policies. Both of which employ draconians measures to ensure effectiveness but they do boast success rates.
I'll say policies lose effectiveness when the populace don't value it or when the neighborhood has powerful bad actors that oppose it, like trying to reinforce gun laws in Canada.
The thing is, Israel legitimately has to fear terrorism. Western countries only keep that ridiculous security theatre because it's politically very hard to get rid of something that got introduced for "safety" even if it has proven to be pointless.
FriedrichN? Is that an allusion to Nietzsche? It would certainly be fitting the sharpness of your observation. Wouldn’t be surprised to find the thought you expressed here in “Human, All Too Human”.
I guess this would comport with his concept of slave morality that states that the collective is more important than the individual and tends to trend towards the lowest common denominator.
This puts the independent operator (lone contractor, entrepreneur...) in an interesting position. For him , effectiveness matters more than loyalty displays. His world is different from that of the "solid tribe member".
Readit News
Performative work is a disaster. I worked in a stuffy IT office of a company before I got my degree and became a software engineer. It took YEARS to deprogram performative work. I still hide when I take a nap. I suspect that if my current company found out I was sleeping on the job they'd still be upset with me. However, my output is so good the results speak for themselves. It would be difficult to fire me for napping.
1.) Sitting in a park sketching solutions on a notebook.
2.) Laying at the beach on vacation.
3.) Playing Legos with my daughter.
Without these ideas, I doubt there would've even been a PhD, or even a paper publication.
(There was a period of 2 years in my life where I did not have any significant ideas, at all. During that time, I was employed at a company which offered a constant stream of urgent TODO emails and tickets. I worked until exhaustion for 2 years, but did not get any work done.)
The 'big idea' came when I was on campus, standing outside smoking. Hit me like a bombshell. I literally ran to see my supervisor, blurted out IT'S JUST A F**G MOLECULE, cleared off his whiteboard and spent the next hour sketching out what turned out to be another 5 years of work.
Those eureka moments are where true creativity turns up, I find it impossible to solve problems through dedicated, stare-at-the-screen thought, but I'll get a brainwave at e.g. the gym and nearly drop the weights on my head.
Companies need to promote creative problem-solving spaces, and I'm not talking about a beanbag area with free lattes, but a sit-and-think, light, non-social way of working that promotes this kind of thing. No idea how this could be done in practice, though.
David Lynch analogizes his sitting-with-cigarettes-and-a-notepad-to-catch-ideas to fishing. You can't chase after them but once in a while a big one will come along.
“Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces… Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one — well, at least one and a half,”
-- The Gathering Storm
Somehow that doesn't make me feel much better
Many of the hard problems in my career have been solved while having a long warm shower in the middle of the work day.
In general, my own productivity trick is understanding and leveraging the Eureka effect. Your subconscious is still working on the problem when your conscious mind is doing something else. Often, if pointed focus doesn't work, just leave it in the back burner to stew. Then wait for the proverbial light bulb to show you the way, out of nowhere. It never fails, yet I have never heard anyone mention this phenomenon.
My empirical explanation is hard problems benefit from unrelated stimuli, so they're able to be approached from an oblique direction. In other words, to think out of the box, stop thinking and do something else.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
So it worked then, it works now. A 20 to 30 minute nap during the work day has a ton of benefits, including stress reduction. I don't know why it is frowned upon. I have fallen asleep many times at my desk and have been made fun of, but who gives a damn. I would rather be stress free and have some good ideas come about.
If anyone is interested, the yoga tradition has extensively developed this technique – it’s called Yoga Nidra.
The latter is associated with aging and physical decline.
I remember doing this, too. I would often nap 2-3 times a day in crunch time and sleep less during the night, solving many problems.
I think the problem as you say is the performative part of work, and napping really doesn't look good in that sense.
Since COVID WFH I often also nap instead of eating lunch, which is a double power boost, since a big lunch can make you almost comatose.
(And most of my favorite papers came about from ideas that I'd had while on vacation.)
I get it that it works but wonder what could be the logical explanation of this. I remember this method was also mentioned in the movie Turner & Hooch.
I think another commonality is physical activity: walking, playing, washing. There may be some chemical thing going on with muscle activity but also subjectively I have a suspicion that these sorts of activities are essentially pumping noise into your cognitive processes, helping divergent thinking, while also keeping your attention sufficiently occupied to achieve the “non-vigilant” posture toward those ideas.
When you dream the constraint on your consciousness (simulation) are lifted to allow more divergent scenario. That’s why dreams can be a bit crazy.
It’s a bit like brainstorming on steroid, letting loose of more constraints.
John Cleese on creativity
So, recent R&D into sleep tech has come along ways in the past 20 years. Basically research has shown that during nap/sleep cycles our brain moves around memories (from short-term to long-term and prioitization) and connections between memories. Also, this process optimizes information in the brain to make the access faster and more efficient thus providing opportunity for neuralogical advanced thought sessions given the datasets after a nap/sleep session.
Some basic take aways include +20% memory capacity per 8-hour sleep cycle and longer un-interrupted access to memory collections. It's also been shown that it's possible to tag the day's memories and then prioritize them during the next nap/sleep session. Significant results have shown that groups that take 30-minutes nap have stronger memory capacity versus groups with no naps.
The face of the R&D seems to be Matt Walker - PhD Brit with intense accent - you've been warned!
TL:DR - The brains basically recharges AND rewires during nap/sleep sessions.
Here's the links:
podcast: The Matt Walker Podcast
book: https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
So the most important thing on a software team (or really any team creating high technology products or services) is an environment where team members feel safe to be themselves– psychologically safe, where they can try out new things, make mistakes, fail, and not be punished or belittled. Say their ideas and have them improved by others, not criticized. It's an environment where team members take care of themselves so they can be creative– sleep enough, exercise enough, be with friends and family enough, play enough.
You have to be at your keyboard or lab bench or whatever enough to make things. But if you are there too much your creativity plummets. This is what I try to get across to my teams.
I agree, one of the ideas that I started applying from the book "steal like an artist" involved having an analog and a digital desk for work.
You have creative ideas and brainstorm at the analog desk, then document, iterate, and refine your ideas at the digital desk.
One of them is using the Voiceliner app during times where it's not convenient to write things down. It also forces me to express my idea in natural language.
People use "research says" to add gravity to ideas, but it's important to share (and check) the sources.
[1] https://paulitaylor.com/2022/05/06/the-case-against-collabor...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226279557_A_Complex...
I think it's important as the poster above you said, not just take the word research at face value. I'm sure that there may be studies that show collaboration can lead to good ideation and outcomes also, I just don't think this one is that.
Some notes from the abstract:
> ... examined cues that evoke a psychological state of working together ... which increased intrinsic motivation as people worked alone.
> Outcomes were diverse, e.g., task persistence, enjoyment and, 1–2 weeks later, choice.
> These cues also increased feelings of working together but not other processes.
> The results suggest that cues of working together can inspire intrinsic motivation, turning work into play. The discussion addresses the social–relational bases of motivation and implications for the self and application.
Does innovation come from running, showering, lying in bed? Absolutely, no question.
But at the same time, when you get a diverse group of people to solve particular problems, they generally come up with far better solutions than any one of them would have on their own.
Because these are really about two totally different types of problems. The first "private innovation" one is often about finding a clever solution to a relatively well-defined problem that is "puzzle-like" -- math, code, chemistry, whatever.
The second "group collaboration" one is often about finding a workable solution to a relatively ill-defined problem that is people/organizational/product -- what is the right marketing campaign, right new product, right new vacation policy? Where the most valuable contribution is "wait, but have you thought of this?" or "wait, but if we do that <bad thing happens>" and everyone says "oh good point, I didn't know that was a constraint/solution!"
The obvious answer is that both are valuable. The idea that they are somehow at odds, or that only the first one is "work", is ludicrous. It's true that "individual contributor" jobs often fall more into the first category. But to denigrate the second category as "not work" is both disrespectful and, frankly, just idiotic.
But let's be honest. Most mantras try to force all work into the "group collaboration" bucket. If HR and other management-training groups value isolated work and individual contributions they sure don't show it. Literally every piece of training I've received about working effectively has been about collaboration.*
I think that's because most work training material is not really about innovation or productivity at all; it's about avoiding HR gaffes and workplace conflict.
*Don't get me wrong; collaboration is a superpower, and many ineffective work relationships I've observed were hampered by someone's inability to collaborate well.
I think that's because isolated/individual work is so obvious and default that there's nothing to train.
People know how to work alone. They often have to be actively encouraged to collaborate, however. HR isn't trying to force "all" work into collaboration, that's silly. But the right way to collaborate often isn't remotely obvious, when there are so many types of collaboration and so many different types of tasks/projects. So training makes sense and pays off here.
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And clever ideas often benefit from a round of annealing to smooth out corner cases and ergonomics. This can either be direct feedback or the result of asking questions about the solution, triggering the author to refine the idea while explaining it.
But we have another name for that process, requirements gathering.
It's not work in any meaningful sense outside of it being something that needs to happen before implementation. But it's output isn't all that useful unless you ARE an implementer. And that's the rub.
The PROBLEM is that people love to talk and wax eloquent to show their intelligence and you get pulled into stupid conversations as a result.
"The mantra of sharing your work and involving everyone in decisions naturally leads to inviting and copying people into things that add no value to them, or you."
Fred Brooks, in his book The Design Of Design, includes a section on "The Magic Power of Teams Of Two". In his opinion, large teams cannot get anything done, and most innovation comes from individuals, but Brooks feels that teams of two people are the sweet spot for innovation. You and one other person -- if that other person can challenge you in the right way, offer a different perspective, or fill in holes in your knowledge, then instead of slowing you down, they speed you up.
I personally have found that meetings of two people (me and one other person) are where all the most important conversations happen about solving problems or plotting strategy. I wrote about that in "Truly Agile development revolves around one-on-one meetings, not daily standups":
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/truly-agile-development...
I often try to recreate that with interns and juniors at my current job, but everyone is so anxious about not typing or not submitting commits they don't stay and watch me work. Plus I think I'm less comfortable with silence than my old mentor was. He didn't care if I was sitting beside him for a hour while he was quietly hacking away. I tend to feel the need to explain a bit too much about my thought processes.
Using that exponent, two people can do 1.6 times as much work as one person so each is about 80% as productive.
Ten people can do 5 times as much work as one person, so each is half as productive.
Twenty five people can do 9.5 times as much work, and each member is 38% as productive as single person.
Split those twenty five into five non-interacting teams of five people, and they can do 15.4 times as much work as one person.
Obviously real life isn't as precise as these formulas, but they provide some guidance.
This book https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/rapid-development-... has tables about the limits of what can be done. The biggest takeaway is that some projects simply can't be done faster than a certain way limit.
The only way around those limits is to find a way to reduce the size of the project. Either cut scope, or find a way to write less code, typically with a more powerful programming environment.
But I found that the pressure of pairing shuts down a lot of thought. Long silences are forbidden in pairing; you must vocalize your thought process. I found myself searching for gaps in the conversation where I could think for a second and blurt out my thoughts before it’s too late to turn the train around. I believe pairing can lead to local maxima this way because there’s no room in the conversation for deep thought.
Pair programming in moderation can be enlightening. Much like traveling to a different town as an artist to learn from other artists. Too much of it and you lose your identity. It is completely possible to remain detached from your work but still desire to work mostly alone on your own tickets. Code ownership is a silly concept. On one hand everyone suggests being detached from your work. Yet everyone simultaneously realizes having your name in a PR matters. I make a habit of crediting people who worked with me in the PR message. It's pretty simple.
I guess something ideal for me would be roughly 70% pair programming, 30% alone time - but I have not been able to test this guess because I have always worked on teams where pair programming is the exception, not the norm.
Over time, I could overcome this „weird“ feeling of not sitting at my desk while working. It went quite a bit like the author describes:
- Load up on context and information.
- Start outlining the problem.
- When stuck, try for a while. If no progress is to be made, go for a walk, do laundry, buy groceries. Stuff _away_ from the computer.
- When potential solution inevitably form in my mind, write them down wherever I am.
I often find that when I arrive at potential solutions this way, I’m usually a lot more motivated as opposed to banging my head against the wall. It’s not only more productive, it’s better for your mental and physical health, it keeps you engaged and satisfied with your work. Many times I simply cannot wait to return to the desk to try the ideas out.
It’s also important to know when to stop. Occasionally there are days where I can get nothing creative done. I have learned the hard way that when I force myself through, more often than not I mess something up so terribly that I need at least half a productive day following up, rectifying what I broke. It may feel like cheating yourself at first but sometimes it’s better to just stop for the day entirely.
However, while employed, have you tried to go out for an extended walk or do something else away from your computer, outside of the building you are required to work in? Deciding to do so without permission can get you a citation and asking for permission leads to blank stares from your co-workers and managers. For many, that’s apparently akin to asking for paid time off whenever you feel like it. The conclusion here can only be that many employers are more interested in owning your time than results, whether they realize this or not. Which brings us to a larger point about work culture and insistence on presence at all times but that’s a huge, separate discussion.
I'm 2 decades into my career amongst multiple different employers in different industries (including traditional stuffy ones), and I've never had anyone even raise an eyebrow at people wandering off for a few hours unannounced
if you're billing the client by the minute then maybe I can see why they'd get upset, but otherwise, as long as you're delivering, who cares?
wandering off for *a few hours* he said ...
Wow, you must be one lucky sir.
Due to limited office space, very quickly these turned into 30mins to 1 hour walks - so each week I'd get 5 really impactful conversations with my peers, through the medium of a walk.
Sometimes the focus would be on connecting as two humans (which helped our working life massively) other times it would be totally work/problem focused. But the space away from the office, and with the privacy that came from being away from everyone else, we got loads done.
Really valued that way of working, I've tried to get it going in my current role, and had some success with Teams 'remote' walks with my last manager (each of us took our phone for a walk in our local areas) but for various reasons this didn't work out well for us.
I don't think so. It's basically just the tragedy of the commons. Most workers are responsible and a 20-30 minute nap/walk break would make them more productive. 20% will abuse it endlessly.
Someone who doesn’t nap at work gets home to find Season 3 of Ted Lasso has landed, stays up to watch it because they can just nap at work if six hours of sleep turns out to be a bad idea. But then they have a good afternoon because of the nap and decide to try it again.
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You can see this in many places in our society. The security theater in airports don't make air travel that much safer, but it does send a signal to the group "look, we're doing something about it!". Same goes for the war on drugs, notoriously ineffective and seemingly only makes things worse. The hunt for benefits fraud is often not quite effective, hurts the ones that actually need the benefits, but the fear of the freeloader is big enough one must be seen to be tough on fraudsters. Or school, where doing what you're told is much more important than any learning you might do along the way. Or the way China is now burying itself with Xi's everlasting reign.
If you think humans are meant to be effective and efficient, you are very much mistaken. Everything we manage do, we do in spite of it.
One only has to look at places that value such measures to see they DO work.
Israeli airports for example or Singapore's drug policies. Both of which employ draconians measures to ensure effectiveness but they do boast success rates.
I'll say policies lose effectiveness when the populace don't value it or when the neighborhood has powerful bad actors that oppose it, like trying to reinforce gun laws in Canada.