Nothing gets done at the end of the day 🤯 Don't worry, we got you covered!

Community Picks is a section on daily.dev where our community members share the most interesting and valuable content they've discovered online. From insightful articles to handy tools, every post is a gem curated by our dedicated coomunity. To contribute to Community Picks, you need to have at least 250 reputation points, ensuring that only active and trusted members can share their finds.

Community Picks

Context-switching is identified as one of the worst productivity killers in the engineering industry. The post provides insights and tips from an engineering leader on how to deal with context-switching at different levels of responsibility.

Context-switching - one of the worst productivity killers in the engineering industry

As a software engineer, it’s really important to have bigger blocks of focus time.

Being well organized with the time becomes a LOT more important for managers

Constant re-evaluation and building strong habits becomes very important as a manager of managers

Getting better at context-switching was mandatory for me

Whenever you are ready, here is how I can help you further

Very good post! However, I wanted to share my thoughts on why it’s hard (to not context switch):
Multidisciplinary Projects: Modern technology projects often require a blend of skills and knowledge areas, including software development, data science, cybersecurity, and user experience design. Professionals need to switch contexts frequently to contribute across these domains effectively.
Agile and DevOps Cultures: The widespread adoption of Agile methodologies and DevOps practices encourages continuous iteration, collaboration across roles, and rapid response to changes. This environment necessitates regular context switches to adapt to evolving project needs and cross-functional collaboration.
Tool Diversity: The abundance of tools and technologies available to developers today—ranging from programming languages and frameworks to deployment platforms—requires them to switch between different tools and environments depending on the project’s requirements.
Constant Learning: The fast pace of technological advancement compels tech professionals to continuously learn new skills and tools, integrating them into their current projects, which inherently involves context switching.
Communication and Collaboration: In an era of remote work and distributed teams, frequent communication across different time zones and collaboration tools is essential, leading to regular interruptions and context switches.

Honestly, Slack is supposed to be the biggest enabler of communication, and it does… but it probably does it too well.
I think Slack is one of the BIGGEST contributors towards context switching in the industry right now. (Or substitute whatever comms platform you are using)
We are encouraged to respond quickly. We have a significant amount of notifications, including on our mobile devices. We have endless channels where someone thought it would be good to bring another group of people together despite the 62 other channels we have that have unread messages.
So, as an Engineering Leader, I tell my team “If it’s urgent, mention me. Otherwise, I may not see it until the end of day.”
I TRY my best to go through every single slack channel and thread at the end of my day to make sure I haven’t missed anything, but at times, it’s a bit much.

very nice and helpful content, also very actually!
Today days, the “agile” framework (on the most part of the dev teams) isn’t follow basic fundamentals concepts. that can broke all the teams effort