Freek.dev

Personally, when I want to work on something I just turn off all notification on my Mac.

Probably reached for the phone. Turned off the alarm. Glanced at the time. Scrolled through the Slack notifications. Went through the emails. You will likely continue doing it throughout the day, approximately 2,617 more times, according to some studies. We all do it, and despite all the virtues of digital minimalism, completely giving up those habits is extreme and, arguably, unnecessary. Yet we live in a culture obsessed with productivity and these harmless distractions are wreaking havoc on it.

Read more [blog.nuclino.com]

Andreas Creten, co-founder of madewithlove, wrote a good blogpost about a few aspects of their company culture.

There are three requirements for making good products: developers with the right skills, decent product management and ideal working conditions. The reason why so many of us wear headphones has to do with the latter. As a software developer, the last thing you want is distraction: colleagues talking to each other, the sound of a coffee machine, a printer and so on. Distraction prevents you from getting “in the zone”, a state of mind in which you deliver your best work.

https://medium.com/we-are-madewithlove/why-is-everybody-wearing-headphones-522a61de27ca

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Developers can appear very unproductive at times, sitting staring at the screen with our headphones on and very little in the way of keyboard clackety-tap. This however is when we are doing our thinking, when we are building up, adding to and rearranging the mental model of how our code will work. This is the biggest and hardest part of development.

Imagine how it feels to have that interrupted at random by a telephone call or somebody walking over to talk to you. It’s horrible.

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Often, when I’m able to slip into a state of flow while coding, I will produce more in a single afternoon than I could in several days of non-flow. Yet this is often an elusive state to obtain. Luckily, research dedicated to this topic in recent decades offers some help. Here we’ll look into both the stages of flow and how to obtain the prerequisites for flow, making it possible in the first place.

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