What the pandemic taught me about focus
Losing the office removed a lot of noise. It also removed a lot of signal.
The first month of working from home I was the most productive I’d ever been. No commute, no ambient office noise, no one stopping by to ask questions. Just me, the code, and uninterrupted silence.
By month four I was the least productive I’d ever been.
It took a while to figure out why.
What I was missing
Offices are noisy. But noise isn’t the same as distraction. Some of that noise was actually information: overhearing a conversation about a product direction, catching a designer’s frustration with a component I’d built, noticing that someone from a different team kept asking the same kind of question.
Remote work filtered all of that out. My signal-to-noise ratio improved in one sense and collapsed in another. I was shipping features in isolation, with less context about whether they were the right features.
What I changed
I started being more deliberate about information flow. More async writing. More explicit check-ins at the start of something, not just at the end. More time talking about what we were trying to do before talking about how to do it.
The tools helped less than I expected. Slack and Zoom are fine. What mattered was developing the discipline to communicate things that used to happen passively.
The lasting change
I still work mostly remotely. And I’m better at it now than I was in 2020, because I’ve built habits that replace what I used to absorb by proximity.
The pandemic forced a lot of those habits. Forced optimizations are still optimizations. I’d rather have discovered them deliberately, but I’ll take them.