Another +1 from Deep Work. The main takeaway for me was the following quote:
"We spend much of our day on autopilot, not giving much thought to what we are doing with our time.
This, is a problem. It's difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don't face without flinching your current balance between deep and shallow work"
I tried his pretty extreme recommendation to schedule every minute of every day (see chapter 'Rule #4' or 6:30:30 in the audiobook), my summary below:
-> I use a 4"x6" lined post-it note pad and block out 30 minute/block blocks throughout the day
-> Interruptions are scheduled for future blocks (although occasional mandatory interruptions
of course occur from time to time), and I edit the post-it note throughout the day
-> At the end of the week I do a post-mortem and review which tasks slipped to the next week and recap what happened
I've found a surprising amount of distractions lurking throughout my day that I've been able to eliminate. Scheduling your day is also really compatible with Agile development as you can easily answer why your JIRAs slipped into the next sprint, what your blockers were, etc.
"We spend much of our day on autopilot, not giving much thought to what we are doing with our time. This, is a problem. It's difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don't face without flinching your current balance between deep and shallow work"
I tried his pretty extreme recommendation to schedule every minute of every day (see chapter 'Rule #4' or 6:30:30 in the audiobook), my summary below:
I've found a surprising amount of distractions lurking throughout my day that I've been able to eliminate. Scheduling your day is also really compatible with Agile development as you can easily answer why your JIRAs slipped into the next sprint, what your blockers were, etc.