David (@hellodavidryan)

Both intuition and a growing body of research underscore the reality that sharing a workspace with a large number of coworkers is incredibly distracting—creating an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously. In a 2013 article summarizing recent research on this topic, Bloomberg Businessweek went so far as to call for an end to the “tyran

Interruption is the enemy of productivity

It’s become fashionable to blame distractions at work on things like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But these things aren’t the problem, any more than old-fashioned smoke breaks were the problem 30 years ago. Were cigarettes the problem with work back then? The major distractions at work aren’t from the outside, they’re from the inside. The wander

The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner, and with interfaces between them that are as carefully designed and, if possible, as articulated as programming languages.

Paul Graham, a venture capitalist, programmer, and essayist, calls this batching strategy “Maker’s Schedule/Manager’s Schedule.”4 If you’re trying to create something, the worst thing you can possibly do is to try to fit creative tasks in between administrative tasks—context switching will kill your productivity. The “Maker’s Schedule” consists of