Quote of the week [LWN.net]

I have to say that Christmas holidays are the best time to hack on things. Most of the yahoos are away on vacation and therefore the constant stream of distractions and really dumb emails in your inbox just aren't there. In short you can work on the things you always want to work on but never can because of time constraints.

-- David Miller

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Quote of the week

Posted Jan 3, 2008 8:04 UTC (Thu) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]

That's been my experience. While working on a software project at a large corporation in the
USA last holiday season, I was able to get way more done because instead of explaining to
people what I was working on and having my time hogged by worthless meetings, I was able to
work most of the time. Yeah, I still had to take calls by my "proactive" manager (who was
worthless) but outside that, I made a lot of progress in that week, at least 3 weeks worth,
and I logged less hours that week.

Sometimes the workers need to be left alone to work.

Holidays every week?

Posted Jan 3, 2008 18:50 UTC (Thu) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link] (2 responses)

So, in the broader perspective, what can we do as individuals and what could we do as a
society to facilitate this throughout the year?

Regarding "really dumb" e-mails there is a relatively simple, if somewhat prickly solution.
We can have a policy directing people to open venues to which they can post their "really dumb"
questions.

Downsides: some "yahoos" are too ignorant to know that they should post questions to a public
list, some of them would be embarassed to post (admissions of their own ignorance) publicly,
and publicly posted questions waste the time of lots of people (every reader, in essence).

Wikis help a little with the later issue --- the "front" of a given wiki page will tend to
show a derivative of the original question (and hopefully its answer) in a vetted, revised,
form with the stupidity (ambiguities, tangled semantics, awkward grammar, etc) edited out.

What are these "other" distractions?

Perhaps some of us can, as individuals, arrange to set aside times when we are in a "working
retreat" (inaccessible to these cacaphonous distractions). Perhaps as little as a 4 day
"weekend" every two or three weeks.

At my current job I find that the first three days of every week are filled with regularly
recurring meetings and conference calls. These are not back-to-back, but are interspersed
with periods of time during which I catch up on e-mail, prepare for meetings, follow-up on
others and get interrupt/event driven work done. Thus the last two days of each week usually
have no meetings (well, we have an informal coffee gathering late Friday afternoon, but that's
deliberately not treated like a formal "meeting" even though we talk shop the and get more
done there than in most other meetings).

Anyway, I think that Dave's comment begs to be questioned. During each new year we have an
opportunity to mull over such things with a bit of social support to "make resolutions"
regarding them.

(Of course one of my personal resolutions every year, for about the 30 of them has been that I
would consider any day of the year as an opportunity to grow and change. Nonetheless, the new
year is a good time to meditate on such things in greater depth).

JimD

Holidays every week?

Posted Jan 4, 2008 19:20 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

I'm not sure Dave's "really dumb emails" are what you're imagining: dumb technical questions. They might also be, "please give me a schedule showing how many lines of code you will have done at the end of each week" or "I think you should sync files at every close." or "Please tell me why you did this project in 4 phases instead of 2."

I think the basic point about getting more work done during holidays is that if you don't have to spend any time participating in larger work that involves other people, you can accomplish a lot more of the things that involve only you.

Work that involves only me is more fulfilling; I feel like I get more done when I do more of that. But it may be an illusion, because teaching others, supplying information for planning, and such are also valuable.

I can remember a few attempts to eliminate "meetings." They always failed, because you eventually have to face the fact that a meeting is called, and attended, when at least someone believes it will be more productive than everyone spending the time working alone. And I've had the same experience with programs where a worker goes into hiding for a while.

If there actually is something to learn from the apparent holiday productivity boost, it's that work should be modularized and workers centrally managed. When that happens, workers spend more time working heads-down. But there's plenty of downside to that too.

Holidays every week?

Posted Jan 13, 2008 18:23 UTC (Sun) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link]

>Wikis help a little with the later issue --- the "front" of a given 
>wiki page will tend to show a derivative of the original question 
>(and hopefully its answer) in a vetted,  revised, form with the s
>tupidity (ambiguities, tangled semantics, awkward grammar, etc) 
>edited out.

This is the "myth of the wiki";  but it just isn't true.  The vast vast majority of Wikis are
complete failures.

1.) Many of the kind of people who send e-mail noise simply won't and don't search first;
they will never see or use a Wiki, BLOG, etc...  Thus wikis create more work (assuming they get
maintained at all) and don't do anything to solve the problem [at least this problem].
2.) Maintaining a useful Wiki requires maintainers who actually know what the reader wants to
know,  for OSS this is usually the developer.  So then the developer isn't coding.  Even
really successful projects like Samba have Wikis of dubious usefulness.
3.) Wikis, unlike things like e-mail, run the risk [and very frequently do - see n-number of
various Wiki entries about LDAP] of capturing and quasi-canonifying out-of-date, stale, or
bad-practice information.

I realize the "social networking" is all the craze, but most of the time it doesn't do
anything but raise the noise side of the signal:noise ratio.

Perhaps "dumb" e-mails and the like are just an inherent inefficiency in the Open Source
process.  The best practice I can think of is for developers [including me] to get better at
just ignoring them;  sometimes being a jerk works.