
Using Spotify as a social signal while working remotely - virtuallyvivek
https://pragli.com/blog/using-spotify-to-communicate-status/
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rs23296008n1
FTA: "They could potentially be deeply focused on a task, but if there is an
urgent task that I need from them, I can likely safely contact them."

You interrupt me during deep focus time[0] and the last thing you should feel
is safe. There had better be a critical emergency, someone dying, major
financial risk or otherwise an important+urgent issue. Urgency by itself won't
protect you.

Otherwise you will find yourself the subject of this week's debrief meeting
about "what didn't work" and more importantly, now responsible for paying for
drinks and food for the rest of the team. We each have a block of time
allocated and we aren't joking about how rare and precious actual
uninterrupted time is.

[0] around 3 hours blocked out per day ahead of time.

~~~
virtuallyvivek
Yeah... the idea was that urgent meant a site outage or customer P0. I'd like
to think that would qualify, no?

~~~
rs23296008n1
We've heard this many times when people hear we have deep focus scheduled:
"You'd better respond or you'll lose customers". But we use teams. The team
responds. There's always many more than one person on-call and/or available to
respond. If one person is unavailable we have others from the team able to
step in.

An outage that can only be resolved using a single hero individual that must
always be available to swoop in to save the day means there was no team
backing them up. That seems less effective: It means no one is really taking
leave. No one is taking real breaks. No one is doing real handovers either on
a regular basis.

The "no real handovers" aspect means that the current state of each system
isn't being checkpointed. We see that as a business risk. Not unlike what
source code control protects against. Imagine you didn't commit code into git
or similar for awhile. Still feel safe about rolling back changes? _How are
you going to roll changes back_? Its a similar thing in people. If you don't
do any handovers then stuff stays in one individual's head.

Your situation might be different. That's fine.

