When your wetware has too many threads... by Aaron Bassett

Yeah, I think that's a good thing.

Speaker 1: Hey, thank you so much for the introduction. Um yeah, so I am uh Aaron Bassett, as you heard there. Um I do have uh ADHD So this talk's gonna be about some of the the things that um I've had to kind of uh adjustments I've had to make to my work life in order to To be able to focus and to get my job done essentially. And that job is a I work for a place called Nexmo. I'm not going to give you like the entire sales pitch, so that's not why I'm up here to do today. If you're interested in what we do we we do have a buff out there. Um what I do want to point out though is is I wouldn't be here without them. Like not just being able to do this conference, being able to do the job that I do. Like I I'm very supported by them and in fact I do have a mental health issue. They're very supportive by me coming out to the community and talking about having a mental health issue.

Speaker 1: So you know they're they're paying me to be here today, to come up here to talk to you about mental health and not about what we do or what products we sell. So I'd really appreciate it if you do have a couple extra minutes to come out Find us in the booth and find out more about us. Okay, so here am I. So this is me. I think I was maybe about like five years old in this photo. Um yes, I was incredibly cute. No, I have no idea what happened either. Um I had a pretty normal childhood But I grew up in the 80s. And in the 80s we we had the best music, we had the best fashion. We had the best shoulder pads. But unfortunately, we didn't have the best mental health care. And we didn't have the best ways of identifying developmental issues

Speaker 1: in kids in schools. So unfortunately I did I did uh go uh untreated or undiagnosed for ADHD for 34 years. You know so the majority of my adult life majority of my career um I've developed um or I've built my career, I've I've run through so many different jobs um while not knowing I had ADHD. So I've I've had the kind of Yes, now I'm medicated, it's awesome. I love it. But before then I had to try and develop additional coping mechanisms. So for those people who don't know what ADHD is or hard effects, I've got like a really short video I just want to play for it.

Speaker 2: The prefrontal cortex, PFC, is the cerebral cortex which covers the frontal part of the frontal lobe The brain region that's been implicated in planning complex cognitive behaviours or personality expression, decision-making, and moderating social behaviour. The basic activity of the brain region is considered to be an orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals. The most typical psychological term for functions carried out by the prefrontal cortex area is executive function. Executive function relates to the abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities. working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectations based on actions, and social control. That is, the ability to suppress urges that if not suppressed could lead to socially unacceptable outcomes.

Speaker 2: The frontal cortex supports concrete rule learning while more anterior regions along the rostral chordal axis of the frontal cortex support rule learning at a higher level of abstraction.

Speaker 1: Okay, so that's kind of a bit of an overview then of what the prefrontal cortex is. And in ADHD, your prefrontal cortex doesn't develop at the same rate as somebody who's neurotypical. So the image up there, that's that's showing a um essentially a comparison between the mass of the prefrontal cortex in somebody who is neurotypical and somebody who has ADHD. So the glowing areas there is where we see a difference in mass. So essentially the prefrontal cortex, my prefrontal cortex isn't as developed as somebody who would have a neurotypical brain. And that sounds pretty awful and it does kind of really impact your day-to-day life. It does have some benefits, however. I love this quote. The good part about having a mental disorder is having a valid reason for all the stupid things we do because we have a damaged prefundal cortex. I would be lying if I didn't say it every now and again.

Speaker 1: I go, sorry, ADHD is an excuse. It also does mean as well that your prefrontal cortex is also what is impaired whenever you're drunk So having ADHD is basically like being slightly drunk all the time and not just because I'm Irish. It also as you saw in the video it affects a bunch of stuff, including your social control. So if I can manage not to break the code of conduct and none of you have any excuse. One of the other things it does in fact as well is uh dopamine. So dopamine is this Your dopamine is essentially your uh your brain's reward system. It's this way of saying, you know, good job. You know, anytime you go to the gym or you take off a Jira ticket or you do something where your brain goes, hey, this is gonna help your survivability, you get a nice little kick of dopamine.

Speaker 1: You know, and dopamine is what helps you to start to build um to build good habits. You know, so you you're you get used to having this this kick of dopamine, you get you get your little fix and you want to do the same thing again to get that to get another fix and so on and so forth. And people with ADHD, unfortunately, we don't produce dopamine in the same way as normal people do, so we don't have that same reward system. I also have a uh Oh gosh, what's the um actual technical term for it? Uh major depressive disorder or depression as everybody calls it. And that's basically caused by lack of dopamine as well. So anything that really that you're trying to do where you're supposed to be getting this like you know, a nice kind of kick from your brain that goes, hey, good job. It's a little bit harder when you don't have a prefrontal cortex. So

Speaker 1: you read all these hard-to-be-successful books. And and them I haven't come across one that says, you know, to be successful, be flicky. Have bad time management. You know, forget what you're doing. Work on the wrong thing. You know, all the stuff that the prefrontal cortex is supposed to control and supposed to help you do. I don't have that. So, you know, being successful based upon the outcomes in these, you know, um self-help books is never really going to be an option for me. me you know and and for most people defining success can be different you know some people it's like six success for them is is their salaries or remuneration and so how much they earn. You know, they're all about those dollar dollar Belle Joe. I know it's an old meme. I'm also old. I like it. Get over it. It's fine. For some people, it's it's it's maybe pyre or success in the workplace. You know, they they want to move up the corporate ladder and that's how they they view their own success.

Speaker 1: Hopefully for some people they view success as being able to help others. You know, for me, the where I've how I've defined my success in business is just avoiding being bored You know, that's for me that's that's my biggest indicator. If if I'm currently feeling that I'm bored in a job, then I know that I'm not being successful, neither for myself or for the company I'm working for. Give me kind of like a little story about just how often I do switch jobs. Um you're everybody here kind of is in tech probably or or at least tech adjacent. You know that normally you start a new job, first thing they do is they give you the t-shirt, they give you the hoodie, they give you the baseball cap, you know, all branded, turn you into that giant walking bellboard. You know. Um my friends used to joke that I really must dislike clothes shopping.

Speaker 1: Because as soon as a t-shirt would get tatty, I would just go get another job. Um big shout out to Nexmo. Um they gave me two hoodies when I started. They've doubled my uh my uh life at that job. But yeah, for me it's like I just want to avoid getting bored. Um and What I mean by getting bored is I I want to hit these flow states. You know, if I'm if I'm not focused on what I'm doing, then I'm gonna be my attention is gonna be all over the place. I'm not gonna feel fulfilled, I'm gonna I'm gonna be bored, essentially. So it's a really interesting book by a guy called Cal Newport that I read. That I've skimmed, let's be honest. I've got ADHD. It's really hard to finish an entire book. But he's in his book he talks about this thing called deep work. And for him, deep work um is these three elements. You know, so deep work equals time times focus.

Speaker 1: You know, so if we look at this equation, we can't really change the time part of it You know, some people mean we sometimes try to do it. You know, we'll we'll hit crunch period and we'll increase our hours from a 40R week to a 60R week. You know, we're trying to make that the T side of that equation larger. But it's unsustainable. Really the T is fixed. So if we want to increase the amount of deep work, of high quality work that we're producing, then the only thing that really 's within our control is is F, is focus. You know, we need to increase the amount of focus that we have. That's actually one of the things I really hate about description for ADHD. You know, it's attention deficit disorder. If anything, it's I don't have a deficit of attention. I've got way too freaking much attention. I just don't have the ability to focus that attention on where it's required. You know, sometimes I'll not be to focus it at all and I'll get nothing done.

Speaker 1: Other times I'll focus it on like the world's best research Reddit comment. You know, and it's it's trying to figure out where that focus should be And if I'm constantly fighting with myself about what I should be focusing on or how I should be changing my focus, then eventually I'm going to run out of spins. For people who are not familiar with the spoons metaphor, it actually came out from people who have chronic pain. So it was a metaphor to explain how they got through the day. So you at the start of the day you have a certain number of spins. Say you have 12 spoons. Okay, and as you do, as you progress through your day and you complete tasks, that costs you a spoon. You know, so you get up in the morning, there's a spoon. You go, you have a shower, that's a spoon. You go to work, that's a spoon. You know, all these small things you do throughout the day, they

Speaker 1: each you have to pay for each living spoon. spoons, which essentially is willpower. You know, it's it's for each thing that you do that you're forcing yourself to complete, it's gonna sap a little bit of that willpower. Now each person has a a fixed amount of spoons that they can spend each day. Sometimes you can borrow some spins from tomorrow, but eventually you have to pay them back and sell your books. And it's as well as spins, you know, you Creativity is not a faucet. We can't just turn it on anytime that we want. You know, sometimes you're not going to be productive. Sometimes it's just not going to happen. You know, you can sit there and you can stare at the screen for as long as you want. And nothing's gonna happen because it's it's not a fossa, it's not something that you can just turn on anytime you want to. You know, there's a lot of factors that go into being productive and being focus and sometimes you're just gonna have to go, hey, it's not gonna happen for me today. I'm gonna go do something else.

Speaker 1: I'm gonna go like walk a dog, I'm gonna go um watch a Trashy TV show or play some Xbox or do something, anything to stop you sitting there burning spins while you try to turn the faucet on. But unfortunately what we actually end up doing is what he calls shallow work. So in the absence of deep work, what we tend to fall back on is shallow work. So shallow work is where you're you're just doing anything to appear to be productive to the other people in the office. We're so conditioned now to feel that we have to be seen to be productive all the time that we actually create work. You know, it's we send those emails, we write that memo, we schedule a fucking meeting. You know, we do anything that makes it appear to there were people in our in our offices that we're being productive that day when actually we're not doing anything.

Speaker 1: We're just burning spins, we're spinning our wheels, we're not getting anything done. And it's it's like the the expectation of that is throughout your entire industry. So this is a tweet. It was just before Christmas, I think, 2017. Nathan Hubbard, for anybody who's not heard that name before, was a uh Stanford educated. He was a VP at Twitter. He was CEO of Ticketmaster. This is somebody who's like at the pinnacle of business. And this is what he was saying. He's like, you know, whatever you're hustling for, tech note. Most people companies are shut down until 2018. So he's saying like this is Christmas period, all companies are closed now until 2018 That means you get two extra weeks to outwork your competition. That's 3. 8% more time. For perspective, you see in bolt one is gold medals

Speaker 1: running 1. 2% faster. These two weeks are a gift, get to work. It's fucking Christmas dude. Give it a break. Like seriously, we're so ingrained now that we have to be productive all the time? You like can't even take a break at Christmas? No, this is this is not how we're supposed to be. This is not how we're going to be productive either. So you get that extra two weeks at Christmas where none of your vendors or anybody else is available, so you're probably not being very productive as it is, and then suddenly you're burnt out in January. No, take the two weeks off. Go relax. Thankfully, not everybody sees it this way. This is another quote from uh Jason Freed, the co-founder of Basecamp. I love it. He's like workaholics aren't heroes. They don't save the day, they just use it up. And for me that kind of that really sums up this whole idea of uh of shallow work.

Speaker 1: Just because somebody's there in the office all day, every day, doesn't mean that they're actually being more productive. Just means that they're using the day up. From my own personal experience, I once worked for an ed tech company and I had a two-ar commute each way every day. And I was like getting really, really burnt out on the work. It was really, really difficult work, lots of technical debt, everything was running way behind. But I still need to be seen to be there every day. You know, I felt if I didn't come in, be sat in that seat, I was letting the team down. And this isn't this is not an exaggeration. I once came in and spent eight hours staring at that That's actually my literal terminal. Isn't Unicorn cute But I sat for eight hours. I didn't go for lunch. I didn't get up to get a drink. I did nothing.

Speaker 1: I sat and I stared at that screen at that blinking banking cursor for eight hours willing myself to be productive. But I was so burnt out that I just couldn't concentrate. There was no way at all that I was going to get anything done. In fact I wasn't like being successful. You know I wasn't um helping the company's mission or anything like that. In fact, I was a detriment to my team. By sitting there, I was part of that sprint, which meant that I was supposed to be taking on some of the tickets, which meant that actually our burndown charts would have been better if I wasn't there You know, all I was doing was just keeping a seat warm. But we we tend to focus on the shallow work because deep work is hard. You know, it's difficult to get into these slow states. You know, so if something's difficult and there's something easier we can be doing, sometimes we we just take the easy route.

Speaker 1: And then becomes self-perpetuating You know, you get into this habit of that's what I do when I come to work. I come in and I send the email or I schedule the meeting or I write the memo or I do any of these other things that actually really aren't productive and are not benefiting me or the company. Okay, so how can we improve our focus then? How can we get into these states of flow? There's a bunch of different techniques that people use. So this is a Pomodoro timer. Essentially it's a kitchen timer that you set for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever time period you want to use. And whenever the timer goes off, you take a five-minute break. You set it for five minutes, it goes off, you take your brick, when it goes off again, you set it back for 20, and so on and so forth. Doesn't work for me. I'm building in

Speaker 1: Like a distraction every 15 minutes. You know, I've barely opened up my editor and remembered which file I'm working on by the started fifteen minutes You know, and then this thing goes bing and suddenly I'm like, oh crap, right, I've got to take a break for five minutes. And I come back off my break and I go, what was I doing? Oh yeah, it was on Hacker News, wasn't I? Um no, I was on Twitter. Yeah, it just doesn't work. You know, I d I spend the entire time just trying to remember what I was doing rather than I see getting everything done Then you have uh get things done is another really popular one. Um get things done is a workflow that you go through anytime a task comes in where you're basically going, you know, can I work on this now or does this need additional information? and you you followed in the workflow and you put it into these little these little buckets to get worked on later. And that's essentially the problem with it for me is just putting things into little buckets that I will then totally forget about.

Speaker 1: The only thing I actually really like from this is the can you do it in under two minutes? And if you can, you should just do it there and then. Which I last time I gave this talk I said that I follow that rule. None of my colleagues are in the audience, so I'm going to say I try to follow that rule. But yeah, that's the only part I really take away from this that kind of helps for me is that uh if it's under two minutes, just try and do it there and then. Then we have um oh bullet journals. Bullet journals are excellent. I've no idea if they actually work as for like to-do lists and stuff, but they look beautiful. These things are like an art form. You know, like I don't know that like is this is this this person's job is just to make really pretty notebooks. I don't think I would ever have time to get anything else done from this.

Speaker 1: I'd be like, oh you know what? I'm gonna I'm gonna like I'm gonna get my color scheme together and I'm gonna do some like I'm gonna do some stationery shopping. I'm gonna get some new c like color. Oh, it's gonna be awesome. And I would never get any work done at all. But they are they are beautiful. Like they really are. Um if if you're somebody who can actually use one of these, I'm I'm so jealous. I would love to be able to do that, but unfortunately. I can. Oh, um one thing I did discover is that they're not called bullet journals. Apparently they're bujos. You know, like freaking JLo or Kemye. I don't think I'm hipster enough for those Eat the frub. Another uh task management one that says pretty popular. Um idea behind it is is you pick your worst task. And you do that first thing in the day. So it's like eating a frog.

Speaker 1: You know, if you eat a frog first thing in the morning, there's nothing worse is gonna happen to you that day It's actually probably one of the better ones for me because I am quite productive in the morning. So I do try and to tackle some of my more difficult tasks when I'm most productive. And that's a lot of what you'll find a lot through this talk is I'll be talking about things that work for me. And really what I'm saying is these are things that I've discovered over time. You know, I'm not trying to change the way in which I like my mind works. I'm instead I'm trying to change the way that I work to fit the way that my mind works And that's probably what I would advise most people. Because part of the organization for people of age ADHD, organization becomes unsustainable tasks because organizational systems work in linearity, importance in time. So all those systems we looked at there, I can take little bits and pieces from them and I adjust them to the way in which my mind works, rather than trying to adjust

Speaker 1: my mind into those different systems. Because really the only system that actually works for me is these. You know, they're they're visual, they're easy to create, so I can just write my task line straight away. You know, I can immediately see what I what I should be working on and and what I should be doing. And they're still stuck on my monitor at home because I travel about 75% of the time. So everything's got its downsides. Okay, so other the other thing then we can do to really kind of help ourselves get these slow states is our working environment. For anybody who doesn't recognize it, the the background of the slide is um actually this is this is Facebook. So this is their their actual like engineering floor. Um I'm actually finding it difficult to concentrate standing here knowing this is on the screen behind me. Um it's that busy.

Speaker 1: You know that just that's that looks like a hellscape for me. Like there's open plan offices and then there's this. I would I would get absolutely nothing done Like um there's just so much distraction, there's so much noise, there's so much um probably movement and things that it it just wouldn't work for me at all. And to be honest, open plan offices don't work for m many people. And we've known this for a while. So this is a quote from a BT futurologist saying that the trouble of open plan offices is they're a one-size-fits-all model which actually fits nobody. For anybody who doesn't know, uh BT is uh British Telecom, um a publicly funded company which is now private. Thank you, Margaret Fetcher. But they do do some good research every now and again. Some of the research is Steelcase. I'm just gonna read some of these so I remember the figures. So a company called Steelcase uh pulled

Speaker 1: a thousand plus office workers. They found that 95 % of them said that um having privacy in the workplace was important. Forty-one percent felt they had privacy. You know, so vast majority of people um say that privacy is important and less than half I feel that they have it. Thirty-one percent of the people pulled, so they had to leave work to get anything done. You know, like that does that not seem insane that you would set up this office for people to come to do work and then they have to leave it to actually get anything done. Most people said they lost uh an average of 86 minutes per day to interruptions, you know, to bricks in their concentration. So if we take that 86 minutes per day and we multiply it out over like a regular work year, that's 10 weeks. over the course of a year.

Speaker 1: You know, two and a half months of unproductive time, just in those little micro interruptions every day. Canada life, find that if people in open plan offices take 70% more sick days. Yeah, we've we've all we've all seen it. There's that one asshole who comes into the office with a cold or a flu and gives it to everybody. Like it happens. And again, it's actually uh that was disingenuous. I shouldn't I shouldn't have uh Being mean to that person. Because the reason they come into the office is because of the whole shallow work and we have to be seen to be productive. You know, again, it's so ingrained in us that if we're not there bum and seat, then you know, we're not getting anything done. We're not being productive In fact, you don't even need to have an open plan office. If you're working in an office that's got one other person in it, your chance of taking a sick day increases by 50%. You know, we are filthy, dirtle, dirty people when we spread our diseases really quickly.

Speaker 1: Queensland University of Technology Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation did a test where they found that people in open plan offices had 90% higher levels of stress. They felt uh they had higher levels of conflict and they had higher blood pressure. Like this is not even affecting just our mental health. This is actually affecting our physical health. you know just working in open plan offices. In fact we don't even need to be in an open plan office. Cornell University um did a study where they just played the noise of an open plan office to people people for fleeers. Didn't actually make them work in the office themselves, they just played the background noise that they would hear from a regular open plan office. And her uh levels of adrenaline spiked. That's your fight or flight response. And not only did they notice that they obviously were feeling a lot more stressed with just the noise going on, but 50% of the

Speaker 1: people studied didn't make any ergonomic adjustments to their workplace You know, so they were so distracted just by the noise that didn't even realize that they were uncomfortable in the way that they were sitting. You know, so this has a huge impact. And it's not something that this is like new studies. Like we've known about open fund offices and we've used open fund offices for a while. This is one from 1896. This is the the counting room in Cambridge. 1900, the long room, um in Wellington. 1902, this is architecture interior design firm. Um 1939, this is probably actually the only Open plan office where I would enjoy working. This is uh Frank Lloyd Wright's Cathedral of Work. You know, so this is probably the the pinnacle of open plan offices. You know, this uh

Speaker 1: he's it's designed to look like a forest canopy, you know, with lots of natural light coming through it. Um each of the tables, or each of the desks that we see there, were individually designed to maximize the space but while still allowing kind of free movement between departments. Like if you're deciding for your business that you're actually going to go co-located and you're going to have an open plan office, this is what you need to be improving. If you can't manage to do this and just just don't. You know, because we get lots of these copies, and normally when you make a copy of something like it, it's just not going to turn out anywhere near as good. 1968, Henry Miller came along with the Action Office. Well he likes to say he came along with the Action Office. He actually stole it from a German firm where they called it organic offices. Um action offices are this concept that you can take kind of modular furniture and you change the office based upon what you needed

Speaker 1: that time. You know, so you can create different pods that people work in, or you can create little breakout areas, or you can chop and change it. Um it's pretty I would say that most people have worked in office it looks like this. You know, they all come out of like the same IKEA catalog. They're pretty much like Like PG Cutter. They're better than what we had before. They're not quite cubicle farms, but they still have a little bit of privacy. But there's still issues there with privacy. There's issues there with noise. There's issues there with distractions, etc. And even companies like where like where I work for Fenexmo. Yeah, we recently did a a redesign of our office. It is beautiful. You know, we've got these lovely like areas where people can sit and watch um films or have meetups and we've got like little cubby holes for people to get away if they do need to some quiet time. You know, even areas that should be noisy, like whenever our

Speaker 1: doing our stand-ups and scrum, you know, we've got like noise cancelling curtains and stuff. And then they plunk all the engineer desks down in neat little rows. You know, it's even companies who are trying to do it really, really well, they're gonna make some mistakes. You know, that's why this is actually my favorite desk. You know, it's because I have full control here. You know, if if uh it's too hot, I can open the window, if it's too cold, I can turn on the heating. You know. Um okay, so I don't get like foosball tournaments. I don't have like a fridge full of like sprite and stuff. But I do have full control of what's there. You know, like I have a second laptop, but all it's doing is showing Aro, the TV series. You know, my my the ADD the ADHD part of my brain is sometimes like a small child. You know, it's just sitting there like

Speaker 1: asking me quite constant questions. looking for input while I'm trying to get some work done. So like any good parent, I just turn on Netflix and just plunk it down in front of it and ignore it. These trashy TV shows are just the right level of like Stimulus with like actually being distracting, they're great. I've gone free the entire Marvel universe doing this. It's fantastic. But yeah, but the whole point is I've got control. You know, if I want to dance about in my zombie freaking slippers, I can You know, this is all stuff I can't do in the open plan office. Well, I could, but probably only once. But here I can I can show that environment and it it it makes such a difference. You know, it's it Okay, zombie slippers aside. Things like being able to control the temperature, being able to control the light, being able to um you know to take a break and then not feel guilty about it whenever you need to. So if you want to go play some Xbox or watch some TV or whatever.

Speaker 1: All these minor adjustments are things that will distract you and will prevent you from hitting flow. You know, it may seem like a very, very small thing to be able to ensure that you know, your temperature is set just the way that you want. But if any anybody's ever tried to work in an environment where it's too hot or too cold, it's incredibly distracting. You know, you need to remove all this an external stimulus that is potential to distract you from what you actually want to do. The second thing then is routine. So once we get our area set up the way we want it, we're removing all our barriers to getting into flow. The next thing then is routine is training your brain that you know this is this is work time. No, this is when I this is when I should be getting into flow, this is when I should be concentrating. For me, this is kind of my optimum. You know, so

Speaker 1: I get up early. I said that's that's when I can concentrate the best, so I get like some work done. Um tonight eight and ten is when kind of the rest of the world is now going out to work and stuff and it starts to get noisier. Um After 10 to 3, then I'm I'm back at work again, you know, I'm concentrating as well as I can. And then by 3 o'clock, that's I'm pretty much done. I'm out of spoons. I don't have any concentration left. So I don't force it. You know, that's that's the time I'm going, okay, I I now recognize that this is the best um times for me to work, so this is the time I should be working. Let's not try and force it into different time slots. And then I've got like usual kind of gem and stuff like that. And part of trying to build this routine up is because as I said You got that whole dopamine thing and the UROC. And besides

Speaker 1: that, you've got to really be very strict about your routine yourself. You know, if you don't have the ability to, if you don't have the chemical um kick from your brain to help you build these these uh routines, then it's something you're gonna have to be um pretty strict on your uh when doing it your manual. For me, unfortunately, it's a little bit more difficult. This is all the travel I could remember from this year so far. So trying to keep this kind of schedule tends to be a bit problematic, but you do what you can Okay, so all this really counts upon you being able to control your environment, control when you work as well. So most people are like, well, my manager's not gonna let me do that. You know? They're gonna want me in the office between nine and five, like sat in front of my desk because that's obviously what a manager's job is, you know.

Speaker 1: They're they're just a glorified clock and clock, obviously. You know, but it's it's not. Like a manager's job is this quote. Um isn't about walking around and and seeing if people are in the offices. You know, it's about creating conditions for people to do their best work. You know, any manager, any good managers I worked with, that's really what they've seen their their position to be. It's not about like making sure I'm actually doing my work. I'm an adult. be doing that myself is about ensuring that I have the opportunity to be do the best work possible I can. And sometimes that's you know it's really easy to do that. You know, um equipment You know, you see all these job ads for technical roles, it's like, you know, you'll get the latest MacBook. Like, that's like hiring a fireman and going, you'll get some hoses.

Speaker 1: You know, it's it's a basic requirement for the job. Let's why why is this a selling point for somewhere? You know? And it wouldn't be a selling point unless some companies were actually nickel and diming on it and weren't paying for the best equipment. You know, we spend so much money hiring good people and then we put barriers up to the success because we don't want to pay $300 from our monitor. Like, come on, seriously. But then it can be managing out, you know, as well. Sometimes so I worked for a company once. It was a product-based company. And the CEO there used to phone the developers directly with product requests. He would skip the entirety of the product development lifecycle and just phone a phone a developer and go, hey, I want to change this page in this way.

Speaker 1: You know, so it was impossible to manage that situation because now suddenly all of our um our burndown charts meant nothing because people were getting pulled out to work on stuff that weren't weren't within that sprint You know, we might as well not have had ticketing. We might as well not have had like our entire QA process because suddenly everything was run out of whack because a page has just changed on somebody's whim. And that situation, you know, you try to manage up, you speak to the CEO, you explain the situation to them, and nine times out of ten, it doesn't change. Because they're the CEO, it's their company. You know, that's their developer sitting in those states. If they want to speak to them, they will. And that that's a very difficult situation to deal with. So what it is, I I spoke to the developers and I asked them is like so the telephones on your desks.

Speaker 1: It's like do you phone other departments? They're like, no, we we get up and walk downstairs. You know, it's a small company. They're like, okay, so do your do your partners or your uh like your significant others phone you at work on them? No, we we everybody has cellular phones. Like why would they call the company landline and and get pass-free? It's like, okay, so you don't fund over departments, you don't use them for like private calls. Is there anything you do use your desk phones for? And like, well yes, sometimes the CEO phones me up and he makes demands upon my time. I say, okay, so I got a big ass box and I walked around every developer's desk and I unplugged the phone and I put it in the box and I set that box outside of the facilities. You know, they were a distraction. They were of no benefit at all to any of the developers there.

Speaker 1: The only thing that they were causing them was additional stress and and uh productivity. So I removed that distraction. And sometimes it's just thinking about that and thinking about different ways that you can overcome obstacles that may not be completely obvious to begin with, that that helps you with flow as well. Okay, so we've got everybody now scattered all over the world. How do we communicate? Because communication is is key for any kind of development and any kind of software development or engineering. So I I sent a test message today and I'm so glad I I did I hit edit message and not send it now because we're we're a fully distributed team and I'm sure there'll be people in different time zones that would not have been Very pleased with me if I'd uh woken him up just to get a screenshot for the slide.

Speaker 1: Um but yeah, so our we use Slack an awful lot for our communication. And weirdly we use Slack, but we use it for asynchronous conversations a lot of time not synchronous. And that is one of the big adjustments you'll need to have if you are going to To let people work from wherever they want to work and whenever they want to work is that you're not gonna be able to get in touch with everybody as soon as you want to get in touch with them. You know, and to be honest, that's a good thing. If you if we get into the habit of just being able to to interrupt anybody anytime that we want, you know, we that's actually detrimental to their flow. Just because we need the answer right now does not mean we should be able to interrupt them and whatever they're doing. You know, so moving to this asynchronous kind of conversation or conversation flow actually

Speaker 1: helps a lot. Um and we have lots of rooms, you know, with very uh obviously serious business talks going on about like mac and cheese and stuff. Yeah, Mac and Cheese's a serious business apparently and Amanda will fight you if you don't agree. We also have some like tools in installed there, like we have like GeekBot that allows us to do kind of our daily stand-ups and chat and things. It's fairly useful. Apart from it's really patronizing, it's like, yes, you got a crippling self-diet. And it's like, great, have a nice day. Yeah, but it does it helps. Everybody he's updated what people were doing. We don't need to be like photing them up all the time and finding the state of some things, you know. Even like we use it as our water cooler as well. You know, it's

Speaker 1: We keep up to date because we are a remote team and we don't see each other very often. Mostly just these kind of conferences. So it is kind of nice to be able to keep up to date what people are getting up to. And then for projects, we we use channels. You know, we use a lot of different channels You know, and and they're really useful because it means then all the conversation is kept in one place and you don't need to be a member of all the channels all the time. You can just dip in and out as you need them. You know, so if you suddenly get added to a different project, you can load up that that channel and you can get caught up on what's being discussed. You know, and I I have quite a few different ones in there. Um I have some that are just muted as well, and I don't and as you can see I don't read all of them all the time, but it's it's a really handy way to communicate between the teams. Okay, so last thing I want to talk about then is is kind of of planning. So all of this stuff is like best case scenario.

Speaker 1: So you're controlling when you work, you're controlling where you work, you're controlling how you work, and that's going to be fine 90% of the time. But then what about during crunch? You know, we've all heard a crunch that that like period of time before like some big release or or there's some deadline looming or something and suddenly it's like all hands on deck, let's let's get we need to get this done right now. And during that periods of crunch, then you know, can we just turn that creativity faucet on? I did want to mention one thing. If people have been following this whole thing about Red Dead Redemption 2, where they work a hundred hour weeks. 100 hour weeks like what the fuck I can anybody think that is in any way at all like reasonable to have someone working a hundred hour weeks? Like it's just not sustainable

Speaker 1: Did they did post like a press release today whenever they got some uh like saying it was only for three weeks. Like, oh yeah, three weeks that's so much better. And apparently as well, it was optional. Yeah, totally optional, I'm sure it was. Uh-huh. And the problem is it's like if we look at so this is our forty, this is how productive you are during a regular 40 hour work week. And if it is tempting to go, okay, we're gonna we're gonna hit crunch time, so we're gonna increase it to 60 hours. Because you are gonna be more productive. So here's like the equivalence You know, so it does fall off over time as you get more fatigued and your productivity does go down. But for those first like kind of what four and a bit weeks, you are more productive. But what we don't normally see whenever we see these kind of graphs is the fact that yes, you are more productive, but your error rate goes up as well.

Speaker 1: So I did a lot of research in a couple different industries. Um Looking at uh different industries where they have uh studies on um essentially error rates. So the two that were obviously the had the most information available was the military and medical. You know, two industries were um awesome, no speaker notes. This is gonna be fun. I was gonna could I change this? Perfect, thank you. Sorry. Lost my timings and everything there. Panic attack. Um yeah. So two industries where they they've done a lot of research into um

Speaker 1: error rates, um medical and military. Because obviously in both of those industries, you know, if you're starting to make mistakes, then people are going to die. The wrong people in the case of the military. And they looked at it like junior doctors, you know, 57% of junior doctors have had or have nearly had some form of accident on the way home from their shift. After an 18-hour shift, they have the their um fatigue level is equivalent to a drunk driver. You know, it's it's incredible the the impact um that just a small amount of fatigue can have on on our mental capabilities. So that's our regular kind of error rate. So let's adjust it then for for what they they saw um people get um start to get fatigued.

Speaker 1: So this is what your error rate would I see then become. So we can see that you know you have this huge spike after you've been running uh kind of crunch time for a few weeks and then it starts to fall off. Now the only reason it's actually falling off there is because you're actually writing less code. You're more less productive. So you're writing less code so you've got less errors. You know, your error rate is still way above what it would be before. So let's adjust the our actual productivity. You know, so let's say each error you know takes us a couple of hours to rectify. You know, so now we're we're adjusted line down a little bit. And let's be honest, if we're creating errors, we're also creating technical debt. So let's knock off a few percentage points from productivity for that as well. Um if you're running if you're working in the kind of company where they're gonna make you run crunch for a few weeks, then they're probably not gonna care if

Speaker 1: Do you don't write tests either? So tests are gonna go, let's be honest, give me the first thing either door. If you're not writing tests and you're not writing docs, either You know, so suddenly that like four or five weeks of of uh additional productivity you had is suddenly down to a week. Awesome. So we run a week of crunch, then we take a week off, we run a week of crunch, we take a week. No. Um they discovered I've in the computer games industry, because who would have thought they run crunch a lot there? But in the computer games industry, apparently every employee needed two to three weeks recovery time after any period of crunch time So if you do a week of crunch, then you're going to be less productive for a fortnight to three weeks afterwards. So you need to really, really be sure that that's going to be amazing. major benefit to getting some released.

Speaker 1: And again, you're probably not going to be able to produce the your best work anyway, because creativity is not a faucet you've only got so much bins, et cetera, et cetera. So the last thing you might do then is is throw more people at it. This is a pretty common thing that they they think we can do if you know you need to increase productivity is just increase the number of people. We can't work one person into the floor, so let's work ten instead But what actually happens is something like this graph is what they normally say it looks like. You know, so you have you add a bunch of people, productivity decreases as you have to onboard those those new people, get them up to speed, and then once they're onboarded then productivity goes back up again. What it actually tends to look like, especially if you're adding people during crunch, is a bit more like this. You know, so you start off and then okay, so you're running a little bit behind, so everybody's kind of a bit neutral.

Speaker 1: So you add a bunch of new people, but everybody was already stressed because it's crunch time, so they didn't really have time to onboard these new people anyway. So productivity takes a lot longer to start to recover. Starts to recover a little bit. Your project managers decide that's not recovering fast enough. So and obviously it worked so well last time. Let's add a bunch of new more new people. So now you have people who were never fully onboarded from the last time you added new people trying to onboard even more new people. So productivity just goes way, way down. It starts to recover a little bit again. Everybody's incredibly unhappy at this point too because they're all stressed and we've probably writing a ridiculous code that's incredibly ugly because nobody really knows what's going on because we've actually so many new people that we don't have enough people to train anybody. And in about kind of week 10, 11, there'll be somebody on the team, probably somebody who's been there from the start.

Speaker 1: He'll just get so freaking fed up that there'll be this major heroic effort to try and get everything finished. And what's actually probably gonna happen. If you're really unlucky, they'll also do a partial rewrite. And I've been in that situation before. Like you know what? You know what this this project is running way, way behind needs? It needs us to start over. And that person's gonna burn out straight away and they're they're gonna go like off sick or something and then the whole like your productivity is just gonna completely hit rock bottom because now you've also got to deal with their partial rewrite that they just left at their backside whenever they went off like a burnout and you might start to recover in a couple of weeks' time, but really your project's now on that slow, slow decline to death where it's just going to be quietly killed off because You know, it's run way over time, way over budget.

Speaker 1: So it really isn't any kind of uh any shortcut apart from planning. You know, so that's kind of like the end of my slides. Um I just want to reiterate a couple little things, you know. Remember Try to figure out what success is for you. It makes things so much easier actually if you're working on something that you enjoy to get into that flow state. You know, so figure out what you regard as success and try to work towards that. Find a company that will allow you to to work towards that success um where you have team members that support you. that buy you squirrel t-shirts to give an ADHD token. Look after your spoons. And even if your brain doesn't tell you like often enough that you rock, I'd think you do.

Speaker 1: So I'm our ambassad. That's my Twitter handle. Our company Twitter handle is there as well. I don't think I'm gonna have enough time for questions, unfortunately. I also know it can be a little bit awkward for people to ask questions anyway in a public forum about what is essentially a mental health talk. I am, however, going to be a bite for the the rest of the conference. So we're going to be on a bit fight there. Please please come ask me any questions you want. If you want to go somewhere more private to ask me any any mental health questions, I'm more than happy to go get a coffee or a beer. If it's right after this talk, preferably a beer. I would much prefer writing technical talks. Like these things are really difficult But yeah, or or hit me up with my DMs are open. So if you'd rather just not do it face to face and just want to send me a DM, I'm more than happy to answer questions that way as well.

Speaker 1: So yeah, so I've been our ambassador's been my my slightly disjointed talk about ADHD. Um, thank you very much.