If I was a candidate for that position, reading that word would make me wanna stay away from that company. Of course this is just a personal opinion. You can always try to fail multitask if you want.

Jason Fried @ Big Omaha 2009 from Big Omaha on Vimeo.

Some points of interest from the video:

• Charge for your products
• Don’t use plans
• Don’t work all together in open spaces where every one can interrupt each other
• Share your knowledge and watch for things that can be extracted into products
• Ideas are for ever, but inspiration for implementing them can expire

During that, I don’t think or act on anything else. I turn off IM, phone, close the browser and stop letting others interrupt me. This way, I can finish it quickly and get on to the next unit of work.

If you find it difficult to stop others from interrupting you, using traditional techniques like telling them politely or not being so polite… you may try a different approach.

Apart from being more productive, I get many more chances to think if I want a break in between my tasks. This way, I burn less brain cells than I did when I thought I was multitasking.

Many claim they can multi task. I don’t believe we can multi task without loosing time or quality. I say, if you are a programmer, don’t do that. How can multitasking make you less productive? Studies suggest that changing between tasks makes you lose time. It could also make you stupider by not allowing you to learn during your work, the same way you could if you were focusing in one task.

Try it. It takes a while to get used to it, but you will never go back once you realize the benefits.

Joe, tried to persuade everyone to use that tool for any form of communication between all and the software department, ditching email. Most did that, but there were two occasions when that wasn’t the case:

1. People who thought it was better to call Joe, describe a bunch of cases to him orally, and then hope Joe would remember everything and go and create the cases himself.
2. People, who although were willing to write the case, they first needed to ran it by Joe orally.

In both scenarios, both types of people just interrupted Joe. They seemingly didn’t respect Joe’s time or concentration. Was this the case though? Was it they didn’t really care or was it they were ignorant and uneducated. After all, can you blame the ignorant?

Joe was trying not to get angry, but he couldn’t always succeed. Joe had a hard time explaining why he didn’t want to be interrupted. He couldn’t even find the right words to make other people aware of his situation. He thought that others thought he was a selfish bastard for not wanting to be interrupted.

Joe, really believed that even one interruption, that would also cause his nerves to stretch, could easily ruin the productivity of a whole day. Imagine that: A whole day’s worth of productivity down the toilet.

Joe thinks of a future where co-workers are not bored to write in detail what they want from him while he is able to get things done in a calm environment. He smiles thinking that having a dream is better than nothing.

Lately, I caught myself matching the picture above. I said enough is enough and set out to become what I once was: A healthy, strong fellow with a clear mind.

How?

Here is what I did:

• Stopped drinking anything except water and the occasional taverna drinks (Oyzo, Tsipoyro, Wine).
• Today I stopped drinking coffee.
• Started eating 4 times a day, not to much at a time.

What? Just that?

Well, I want to make many more changes, to become a healthy programmer, but what I have learned by now is not to overwhelm myself by making many difficult changes all at once. I used a technique that is also used in programming: Divide and Conquer. I have many more changes in line and I will post about my progress from time to time.

What this really means, is that I was the first user for these applications. I knew exactly what the problem was, and I also knew what the best solution should be.

Developing other applications where I am not really a user, means I only have my accumulated knowledge over the years about the business domain, the knowledge of other people, my assumptions and my ability to continue writing code even if I am bored to death. I can tell you this is really difficult to handle. Developing in order to solve something you really don’t care about. Developing an application based on assumptions you make is a time bomb ready to explode.

Most successful and usually small companies, started out solving their own problem first and then offered their solution to the public. There are always people out there that want a solution to the same problem as yours.

I think this is a recipe for success even if you don’t have a lot of money to begin with.

Having a slow machine is a punishment, not a means to write better software. If you need to build an application that performs well in a certain PC configuration, then you build exactly that configuration as a separate computer and do your testing, debugging, optimizing, profiling or whatever the hell one should do to a piece of software for testing, in that computer.

You, as a programmer, should have the fastest PC available. Why? Because, almost every freakin programming tool nowadays is dead slow and if you don’t have THE PC, you will soon get sick of waiting for the designers to draw themselves or for a project to finish loading. Your programmers will soon prefer the browser to hang around while their customer-optimized PC tries to build 10 projects.

The comment list of Jeff’s post is not the only place I have been introduced to such suggestions. It has also been suggested to me recently by a manager. This is getting worrying. For once and for all, repeat after me:

I will not punish my programmers by giving them a slow PC, in order to force them write faster applications. Instead, I will pretend I have a working brain for 5 minutes, which is enough for me to order a separate slower PC for testing and optimizing purposes.

If you think it is expensive, then you should close your company because obviously you are not able to calculate the ROI for actions you make.

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