When I started working for a national AV integrator in 2010, I had to fly almost every other week. It was expected that a programmer would be on-site for final commissioning, but sometimes I could get away with only flying in for the last couple of days. This pattern continued for quite a while: office for one week working on next week’s programming, then in the field the second week for commissioning. Rinse and repeat.
It didn’t always go to plan though. I also had service calls where I would be dispatched during the time I’d set aside to work on programming. So I would lose time driving to a local client, only to troubleshoot wiring issues or faulty gear. Good use of billable programmer time! This did teach me not to spend more time than necessary in the office working on offsite programming. I would try to finish as quickly as possible because I knew I couldn’t count on having the full week to work on it. I was also salaried so the expectation was: get the job done, who cares about your hours.
Then I got married. We had kids. I couldn’t be away from home quite so much, so I tried to push back on travel and opt for more remote work. My team finally got work to pay for TeamViewer licenses (that I’d been using freely for years at that point). I think the reduced amount of travel improved moral, but it did make commissioning harder. What I used to be able to turn around in a day or two started taking three, or even a full work week. Maybe not as productive as I once was, and sometimes the difference in timezone meant working long into the night. Trading one unhappiness for another.
So anyway, what sparked this post is: I just got back from a trip to Washington DC. It’s very rare for me to travel at my current company but every time I do, I’m reminded why. I lose a ton of productivity when I’m in the field.
If I’m in the office, I’m frantically trying to program 2 or 3 jobs that are all happening at the same time. It could be more, but thankfully I made 2024 The Year of NO! so a lot of programming work gets contracted out again. I’m also a team of two now, and it has helped immensely for me to regain some sanity! Haven’t recovered any time yet, but I suspect that will happen sooner now. So while I have reduced my workload, I’m constantly inundated with emails and phone calls. I’m a manager, but my team isn’t large enough for me to delegate most of the work. I’d really like to get another programmer on staff for the West coast, but that will have to be 2025 goals.
When I’m in the field, I do my best to focus on the customer in front of me. I can’t split my time like I do at the office. This means I say No! to a lot of help requests that come to me. I have to. I can’t get bogged down working on some other problem when I’m taking up a customer’s time and using their space. But just that those requests keep flooding in is still enough of a distraction, it slows down the work I’m trying to do.
This last trip spanned a weekend, and while I feel like a tool for giving up a weekend for work, I’m always amazed at how easy things are to do when I don’t have a constant interruption battle. Like, I could quickly find and fix bugs in programming because I could focus on what I was doing. It was a reminder that my time estimates have skewed over the years to include all the communications bullshit that pulls me away from getting actual work done.
I feel like we’ve done this to ourselves. There are too many communication channels now, and they’re all flooded with noise. If I could, I would mandate the following uses:
- Email for low priority messages, task assignments, or distribution group messages (maybe not low priority in that case)
- Teams chat for quick questions or sending documents for review
- Teams or Zoom video for meetings (if not everyone is located in the same office)
- Text message or phone call for urgent things
And that’s it! If I could switch to only checking email messages a handful of times throughout the day, I could recover that focus I’ve lost. And working in the field over a weekend reminded me of what could be. But that is not the culture at our company. I tend to get someone using at least 3 of those mediums to convey the same information.
I’m about to post this, and I see that WordPress has added a bunch of AI tools to the publishing checklist. I somehow feel that AI is going to make the problems I stated above worse because it’s only going to add more noise to the mountain of communication I have to sift through every Monday – Friday.
Kiel the Coder 