How not to distract yourself from work. Tips and slak bot

Distract badly, very badly! Everyone knows this, but not everyone knows what to do with it and what is the real scale of the problem. So I decided to put together a few techniques to reduce the number of distractions and even wrote a small bot to help me with this.
The first part of the article is about the causes of interruptions and how to deal with them. Those who are more interested in how to raise their Python-bot for Slack on Heroku with automated testing on Travis, please go straight to the second part . And we get to the bottom of the problem.

The problem is not with you, the problem is with me

There are exactly two sources of distractions: external and internal. The first is usually associated with the inability to process the incoming flow of information and the painful dependence on social applications (I ’ll open Instagram for a moment, someone has put new likes there ). The second is with our colleagues, friends and relatives ( Vasya, I have literally five seconds a question. Is there half an hour? ). So, you need to fight, too, for two forntam. Let's start with the internal

See you no longer want!

No apparent reason for distractions - no distractions. Hide all unnecessary:
- we hide the taskbar, now we don’t see the indicators of new messages in the mail, sleek, Watsape, Vaiber, telegraph. Even if you leave pop-up messages, the lack of an icon of screaming “you have not read all the important comments” will automatically reduce the number of interruptions. Well, at the same time customize the notifications themselves :
')
- remove the icons of all social networks from the main screen of the phone. Let it be on the second - not scary, now it’s longer to reach for them, we don’t need any more. Surprisingly, but the fact is, this simple method allowed me to open the damn VKontakte twice less often just to check what's new there.
- choose a new place for the phone. The huge colorful AMOLED screen right next to the keyboard distracts by itself, even if there is not a single notification on it, so we find a place for the device out of sight so that it gets even a little, but laziness. An important call, we still do not miss, and miss - call you back.

Well, what are you sawing? He said: I will carry the Christmas tree!

What if these are not likes in Facebook, but something more important and your irritant is already external - a colleague, or maybe even a boss? Set aside for later! If the servers do not light up right now in the data center, and the junior intern does not resolve the conflict in the master branch via 'git push --force', the distraction can be postponed, and thus the context switching can be prevented. Slak allows you to remind about any message in a few minutes or hours . Something important - we postpone for half an hour or an hour, something really important - for 5–20 minutes, during which time we will have time to bring the task to the point, or at least finish the method. Your messenger does not support reminders? Mark messages unread and / or create a timer, now let's not forget.

Why is it generally worth postponing things for later? Because this “later” implies no more than an hour or two, and within an hour we will still interrupt, but half a minute to read the message and postpone it, better than 5–10 minutes, since they no longer confuse the task context. A study based on real work sessions in Eclipse and Visual Studio showed that we work two hours a day at most once a day, with the cost of one distraction being ten to fifteen minutes to start writing code again, and only every tenth programmer manages to start again write code in less than a minute if he was distracted right in the middle of the method. And for those to whom the office environment does not allow them to work without distractions at all and for one hour they invented a tomato technique: we split up the day into small segments, every 25 minutes we focus on the task, then 10 minutes for everything else, we repeat. Already 25 minutes can usually wait 99% percent of even very important things.

Honey, you have until noon - I have only one!

If you have already sent one colleague to wait, but already writes another with his task? Your heart belongs to the one who wrote first. The second put in the queue. In this case, we inform you that it is possible and necessary to write about the task in more detail, but you will only read when you understand the first one.

Multitasking man is given much worse than the processor. In truth, even the processor multitasking succeeds worse than single-tasking (we read the beautiful Joel and DeMarco ). Even if the second task is more priority, but not so much that it needs to be done in 10 minutes, it can wait. With fewer interrupts, you complete both tasks even faster.

Why don't you want to talk to me?

You just did, as I advised, and a colleague was offended at you? Well yes! Few people like that they ask him not to interfere, especially if he does not understand the reason. Therefore, your colleagues should be aware of how harmful interruptions are, and that you sometimes postpone some of the questions for later, only in order to finally accomplish all tasks faster and more qualitatively. Therefore, we add links from the article to the whole office, give the director a book of DeMarco and are not afraid to discuss at work how to communicate more productively. For example, do not break one thought in a chat into several sentences and not greet one another, always give context along with a question, etc. Well, do not abuse trust yourself - they said they would answer in 10–15 minutes, answer! One of the reasons I heard in justification for the idea of ​​saying hello and then waiting was this: “otherwise they might not answer me at all.” Do not be such a man! If colleagues understand that you can be trusted, they will just be less likely to remind you of their tasks. Well, do not distract others without doing.

Perhaps you have a question, why do we need a bot at all? I just decided that a small assistant would be useful to me, who would follow what they wrote to me (and what I write), and if, after the greeting, nothing appears in the chat for half a minute, send the link to nohello.com to the troublemaker . No one will be offended by the bot, and good manners in the team should be maintained at the level.

Thank you all and hello!

P.S. Running around a bot on employees of my own company, I do not exclude its release to public, if it’s interesting - write.