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Deep work refers to highly productive activity resulting from a distraction-free environment that allows you to attain peak concentration. It occurs when you're fully focused on the task at hand, without any external pressures on your time or attention.
Usually, eliminating distractions makes it easier to achieve positive outcomes in demanding creative and professional work, including software engineering. Effective deep work strategies rid you of the need to check messages, context switch between apps, and juggle different work-life balance priorities, allowing you to get more meaningful work done with the time and energy you have available.
This article explains the importance of deep work and how you can facilitate it in your company. You'll also see how DevStats Activity HeatMap can help you measure the amount of deep work your developers are getting, giving you the data you need to optimize productivity.
Why Deep Work Matters for Developers
The term deep work was coined by computer science professor and productivity expert Cal Newport. It describes the combination of mental and physical factors that result in individuals being able to focus to their fullest ability. They are deeply immersed in the task at hand, impervious to external influences.
Being able to practice deep work is crucial for people who must grapple with complex, thought-driven tasks on a regular basis. Developers are responsible for building optimal solutions to challenging problems with multiple possible approaches; evaluating the options and designing an innovative response requires intense concentration. As software systems are large, diverse, and composed of many interconnected components, it can also be difficult to maintain a mental map of their operations when devs are constantly interrupted by clunky processes or unavoidable colleagues.
Practicing deep work is a pragmatic way to address these issues. Access to distraction-free time that permits a singular focus on problems improves productivity, enhances problem-solving abilities, and promotes greater efficiency to enable a higher rate of innovation. In turn, this can reduce stress and burnout, leading to further productivity increases. Simply enhancing a developer's ability to concentrate on what matters produces a positive feedback loop that boosts your overall software delivery throughput.
Deep Work Challenges Experienced by Developers
Many engineers instinctively recognize the benefits of deep work, but it can be hard to realize them in practice. Unfortunately, developers often struggle to achieve deep work during the day. Interruptions such as new emails, chat messages, and change requests can easily cause distractions that make it harder to stay in flow. When this happens, it takes an average of twenty-three minutes before productivity recovers.
Other factors impact a developer's ability to focus too. Unrealistic deadlines or excessive workloads can prompt nagging doubts or worries, making it harder to concentrate on important tasks. Having to continually shuffle commitments or context-switch between different projects causes focus fragmentation and reduces the time available to engage in deep work.
Company culture can also make it hard to practice deep work. When individuals are accustomed to instant communication, it might not be possible to avoid every distraction. Similarly, open-plan office environments and remote work can expose people to interruptions that make it difficult to sustain deep work sessions.
How to Enable Deep Work in Your Company
Just a few simple steps can go a long way towards helping developers achieve deep work and stay in their flow state for improved productivity.
Encourage Time Blocking for Deep Work Sessions
Deep work is only possible when developers have time to sustain their focus on a problem without having to pursue other commitments or deal with distractions. In a busy team environment, this time doesn't always arise automatically.
Time blocking allows devs to have dedicated deep work sessions where they know they won't be interrupted. Blocked-off time should be reserved for focused work; if any new priorities arrive, they should be scheduled around the deep work block to ensure the opportunity isn't lost.
It's often helpful to inform team workers of scheduled deep work sessions—or use status settings in chat apps like Slack—to minimize the risk of an unwanted intrusion.
Establish Clear Communication Protocols
Clearly defined communication methods complement time blocking by making it less likely that developers will be pulled out of their focus state. If team members know not to expect an instant response, devs feel less pressure to regularly check chat messages during the day. This frees up more time to use for productive deep work.
Beyond the when of communication, consider the how and why. For example, it's usually less disruptive to send an email or chat message instead of approaching an individual at their desk. Sticking to asynchronous methods for nonurgent discussions can help everybody stay on task.
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Provide Dedicated Focus Workspaces
Different individuals will have their own requirements for achieving peak productivity. Whereas some may find it relatively easy to attain focus, others will benefit from access to dedicated workspaces that provide a quiet, distraction-free environment. Inviting team members to disclose any difficulties they experience in the workplace can unlock more deep work sessions.
Supporting these preferences—such as by offering private workspaces or individual furniture and equipment choices—can be costly or inconvenient. However, you should balance this outlay against the long-term increase in productivity it enables.
Offer Flexible Working Arrangements
Given the individual nature of focus and concentration, flexible working arrangements are another key enabler of effective deep work. Some people will be more productive in the morning, whereas others will favor afternoon sessions. These requirements aren't static either—personal worries, workload changes, and daily moods can impact whether developers feel equipped to focus at a particular time.
You can accommodate these factors by giving devs more autonomy to choose how they work. The ability to customize and change hours gives developers the freedom to focus when they're most productive while avoiding any problems that could compromise deep work sessions.
Foster a Deep Work Culture
Promoting a culture of mutual respect for deep work is one of the best ways to facilitate long-term success. Individuals need the cooperation of others to stay focused during deep work sessions. This requires everyone to understand the benefits of deep work and support their peers in making improvements.
The best practices discussed above all help to establish a deep work culture, but there are more steps you can take to secure it:
- Ensure developers have time when they're not required to respond to notifications.
- Schedule meetings in advance so that devs can plan deep work sessions around them.
- Educate teams and managers on the importance of deep work and its effects on productivity and well-being.
- Provide updates on how deep work is improving delivery output, such as by using tools like [DevStats](https://www.devstats.com) to measure completed activity.
- Efficiently prioritize tasks and avoid making scheduling changes after they've been assigned to developers.
- Automate processes to reduce your dependence on specific developers to apply actions and approvals.
These measures can help you consistently realize the benefits of deep work by aligning everyone with principles that support it.
Creating an environment that's conducive to deep work can feel daunting, but improving automation, developer autonomy, robust calendar use, and communication allows devs to maximize their time in flow state and attain sustained focus on meaningful tasks.
Measure Deep Work with the DevStats Activity HeatMap
Understanding how much deep work developers are getting allows you to make informed decisions on how to improve your workflows.
DevStats lets you analyze data from your source repositories to reveal when developers are working on code and which types of tasks they're completing.
The DevStats Activity HeatMap provides useful insights into developer working patterns. The visual chart allows you to monitor activity at the daily, weekly, or monthly level, with an hour-by-hour breakdown of the number of tasks completed. You can filter to check the volume of code commits, merge commits, PR activity, PR comments, and ticket activity initiated by specific individuals in your team to see who's authoring, planning, and deploying code and the amount of time each activity consumes.
The Activity HeatMap allows you to quickly spot when developers are having trouble scheduling deep work sessions. It provides a visualization of developer activity throughout the day, allowing you to spot times when output is lower.
It's important to interpret the heat map's output in the context of your team's long-term trends. Reduced output may be due to distractions or interruptions that prevent deep work, but it can also appear when developers are working hard on a single large problem.
The Activity HeatMap is therefore best used as a data-gathering starting point to begin targeted investigations into opportunities to optimize team workflows, stabilize communication methods, and bolster overall productivity.
Conclusion: Endorse Deep Work to Maximize Developer Productivity
Deep work is focused time spent on value-creating tasks. It's the flow state that occurs when you're free from the distractions that normally diminish your cognitive capabilities. Making time for deep work—such as by blocking off calendar slots and providing private workspaces—ensures developers have the opportunity to attain peak productivity, which improves software delivery throughput.
It can be challenging to measure how much deep work your team is actually getting, but this is where DevStats comes in. The developer analytics platform lets you precisely analyze how your developers' time is spent so you can understand whether teams are performing effectively. The Activity HeatMap, in particular, lets you visualize whether tasks are being completed in multiple short sessions, which suggests unfocused work, or larger time blocks that imply sustained deep focus.
Try DevStats for free to reveal your team's true working patterns.
