🛡️ My strategy against distractions as a software engineer working in an open-floor office

With distractions becoming more prevalent, engineers need effective strategies to minimize interruptions and enhance their focus. This article offers actionable insights to fight them.

For software engineers, maintaining focus and minimizing distractions has become increasingly important.

• We’re able to automate most of the undifferentiated effort, leaving us only with the complex work

• Distractions are more easily available, reducing our overall capacity for focus work. Our brains are left feeling sluggish and overwhelmed.

In software engineering, success is measured by the impact of your contributions, not by producing a higher amount of mediocre code. Gaining the ability to sustain focus will enhance your productivity and the quality of your work.

In this article, we'll explore actionable strategies that anyone can implement to minimize workplace interruptions and create a more productive environment.

⭐ In this article, you’ll learn

• How to get people to respect your boundaries around communication without alienating them

• How to organize your work as an individual contributor

• How to “hack” your environment to avoid distractions and get into the zone for focused work

• How to make this work in the long term

🦹 “But people will distract me anyways”

1. Set communication expectations

🔑 Purpose: Establish a response time agreement with peers. This removes the pressure of replying immediately from you, and makes them at ease because they know you haven’t ignored them.

💡 Tip: Overcommunicate your capacity and availability in advance to manage team expectations and decrease unnecessary follow-ups.

⚡ Start now: Ask your manager in your next 1:1 meeting what’s a realistic expectations for response time. I’d recommend to aim for responses within the same half of the day.

2. Use “focus signals” to set boundaries

🔑 Purpose: Signal your deep work mode to prevent interruptions.

💡 Tip: Communicate these focus signals to your team so they understand that you are engaged in focused work and should not be interrupted.

I like changing my slack status when I’m going to be a couple of hours without checking it.

If you have specific focus hours every day, inform colleagues about them in advance to reinforce your boundaries.

⚡ Start now: Use visible signals like headphones, a “do not disturb” sign, or a simple desk indicator.

3. Batch your admin work and communications to reduce interruptions

🔑 Purpose: Minimize disruptions by doing small pieces of work all together.

💡 Tip: Close messaging apps and notifications outside of these designated times to maintain your focus.

You can establish a direct communication method for true emergencies, so team members know when it's acceptable to interrupt.

For all engineers that are on-call, you can write a Slack status indicating people to page you if you really need to break away from your focused work time. I’ve never been paged, the most direct method has been calling through the meeting software without planning it in the calendar.

⚡ Start now: Plan specific times for checking messages and emails—consider checking them twice daily.

🍽️ “But I keep getting work pushed onto my plate and struggle to prioritize.”

A valuable insight from Cal Newport’s book Slow Productivity can help you manage this situation effectively:

• Establish a Push-Based Backlog: Create a system where colleagues can submit their requests to you.

• Implement a Pull-Based Sprint: Allow yourself to select tasks from this backlog based on your priorities.

When someone adds a task to your backlog, provide visibility into your current workload and the prioritization of existing tasks.

This approach shifts the conversation from debating timelines for individual tasks to discussing how to prioritize among various responsibilities.

The following techniques will help you on this prioritization to pull from your personal backlog:

4. Adopt Time Blocking for High-Value Tasks

🔑 Purpose: Allocate focused time blocks for critical work.

💡 Tip: Protect these time blocks as you would for important meetings, and try to schedule them during your peak focus hours.

Most people only write in their calendars the real meetings. If you don’t abuse blocking your availability, people will rather find another slot to schedule your time than challenge you to change an existing meeting. In this case, it can be a meeting with yourself to do focus work, but they don’t know.

⚡ Start now: Reserve calendar blocks specifically for deep work tasks such as coding, content creation, or strategic planning.

5. Task Prioritization Techniques

🔑 Purpose: Focus on tasks with the highest impact and urgency.

💡 Tip: Use prioritization tools like the Eisenhower Matrix to filter out low-impact tasks.

Delegate or delay tasks that don’t require immediate attention, allowing you to concentrate on high-value work.

⚡Start now: Start each day by listing three top-priority tasks that require your concentrated attention. You can create a template for each day so you never forget. I can recommend you the template from

Jordan Cutler

in his article How I plan my week as a Senior Engineer in Big Tech

6. Use the Pomodoro Technique for Sustained Focus

🔑 Purpose: Balance periods of deep work with recovery breaks.

💡Tip: Consider experimenting with longer blocks (e.g., 50 minutes) for high-focus tasks, and engage in movement or stretching during breaks.

During breaks, avoid screens and opt for restorative activities, like stretching or taking a short walk.

When you need to do admin work, schedule a block of admin work. Don’t “sneak it in” during the day.

⚡Start now: Work in focused intervals, such as 25-50 minutes, followed by short breaks of 5-10 minutes.

🏢 “But I work in an open floor office and my teams requires a lot of meetings”

7. Change Your Physical Environment

🔑 Purpose: Use environmental cues to support focus.

💡Tip: Place distracting devices out of reach (e.g. put your phone in your bag) to reduce mindless checking and breaks. Install a website blocker to prevent mindless checking while in a focus period.

⚡Start now:

• Separate devices for different purposes, such as one laptop for work and another for personal use. You can also do this digitally with different browser profiles.

• Separate locations in your office for different kinds of work. Make use of meeting rooms and phone booths to isolate yourself when you need to do something deep, such as reading an important document without noise.

8. Minimize Sensory Overload in the Office

🔑 Purpose: Create an environment that reduces sensory distractions.

💡 Tip: Experiment with various sounds (like white noise or nature sounds) to find what keeps you relaxed yet alert.

⚡Start now: Use noise-canceling headphones and ambient noise youtube videos to reduce the sound distractions.

9. Embrace Asynchronous Communication

🔑 Purpose: Reduce meeting hours by opting for asynchronous work.

💡Tip: Limit synchronous interactions to only the most necessary situations, saving time and maintaining better control over your schedule.

⚡ Start now: Subscribe to strategizeyourcareer.com to read next week’s article 🔍 Less Talk, More Code: Working asynchronously to reduce the meetings that could have been an email

🔄 “But I end up losing these good practices after a few weeks”

This is normal. There’s no better productivity system than the system that you end up using.

10. Review and Reflect on Your Productivity Regularly

🔑 Purpose: Ensure continuous improvement in maintaining focus.

💡 Tip: Note your productive blocks and recurring distractions, adjusting your focus strategies as necessary to maintain high productivity.

Take action items after your personal retrospective. This is what makes you improve the process and get back on track.

⚡ Start now: Conduct weekly or bi-weekly reflections to evaluate what's working and identify where distractions may be creeping back in.

🎯 Conclusion

Remember the purpose of all these tactics: Dedicating more time to focused work to achieve better results.

Focus is a muscle. If you are eating fast-food, you can’t run a marathon. If you are constantly distracted, you can’t perform at your best even if you get a day with zero distractions

I encourage you to experiment with these strategies, discover what works best for you, and commit to creating a distraction-reduced work environment.

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👏 Weekly applause

These are some great reads from my last week:

1. Simple code is the best code by

   Engineering Leadership
   . Complex solutions are harder to maintain. The best products have a simple UI, and the complexity is hidden from the customer.

2. What You Work On >> How Hard You Work by

   The Developing Dev
   . This one resonated with my topic from today. Context-switching causes you to work harder, but you achieve less. And if you work on the wrong things, then even less.

3. How Amazon S3 Works✨ by

   System Design Newsletter
   . Deep dive on Amazon’s S3 internals

4. The Developer's Guide to Working with Legacy Codebases by

   Tech World With Milan Newsletter
   . An interesting one to start working on a legacy codebase. Better to know the entrypoints, hotspots and start writing tests while refactoring than being too overwhelmed to know where to start

5. How to do 6 Weeks Worth of Work in 2? by

   Techlead Mentor
   . Lowballing estimations just to get it done faster for your benefit usually leads to a harder time for yourself.

6. How To Create Your Own Luck by

   Developing Skills
   . I really like this one becuase I’ve seen the same myself with online writing. Rather than trying to plan all your journey until your success, you just start, connect to people and discover where you go.