OK, let’s see if I can actually get this thing written.

It’s a little hard to focus right now. We’re almost two weeks into life with Copper the shockingly cute cavapoo puppy. He’s a great little dude, and life is already better with him around. But holy crap, it’s like having a human baby again — except that I’m almost thirty years older, and Furry-Mc-Fur-Face doesn’t use diapers, so it seems like every ten minutes we’re headed outside to do his business. Apparently it’s super-important to provide positive reinforcement for this, so if you happen to see me in the back yard at 3am waxing poetic about pee and/or poop, well, yeah.

What’s interesting about my inability to focus (better explanation of this in a minute) is that it’s not like I don’t have blocks of open time in which I could get stuff done. Copper’s day is an endless cycle of (a) run around like crazy having fun; (b) fall down dead asleep; (c) go to the bathroom; (d) repeat — with a few meals jammed in between rounds. Those periods when he sleeps can be an hour or more long, so there’s certainly time in the day to be productive.

And yet, in at least one very specific way, I’m not. “Tasks” get done just fine. The dishes and clothes are clean. I take showers. I even mowed the lawn the other day. I’m caught up on most of my TV shows (BTW Gold Rush is back!). But when I sit down to do something that requires focus, it’s a lost cause. Why is that?

Things that require focus require me to hold a virtual model of the work in my head. For most of my life the primary example of this has been writing code. But it applies to anything that requires creation and creativity — woodworking, writing, art, all of that stuff. These models can be pretty complicated, with a bunch of interdependent and interrelated parts. An error in one bit of code can have non-obvious downstream effects in another; parallel operations can bump into each other and corrupt data; tiny changes in performance can easily compound into real problems.

IMNSHO, the ability to create, hold and manipulate these mental models is a non-negotiable requirement to be great at writing and debugging code. All of the noise around TDD, automated testing, scrums and pair programming, blah blah blah — that stuff might make an average coder more effective I suppose, but it can’t make them great. If you “walk” through your model step by step, playing out the results of the things that can go wrong, you just don’t write bugs. OK, that’s bullsh*t — of course you write bugs. But you write very few. Folks always give me crap for the lack of automated tests around my code, but I will go toe-to-toe with any of them on code quality — thirty years of bug databases say I’ll usually win.

The problem, of course, is that keeping a complex model alive requires an insane amount of focus. And focus (the cool kids and my friend Umesh call it flow state) requires a ton of energy. When I was just out of school I could stay in the zone for hours. No matter what was going on in the other parts of my life, I could drop into code and just write (best mental health therapy ever). But as the world kept coming at me, distractions made it increasingly difficult to get there. Kids and family of course, but work itself was much more problematic. As I advanced in my career, my day was punctuated with meetings and budgets and managing and investors and all kinds of stuff.

I loved all of that too (ok maybe not the meetings or budgets), but it meant I had smaller and smaller time windows in which to code. There is nothing more antithetical to focus than living an interrupt-driven existence. But I wasn’t going to quit coding, so it forced me to develop two behaviors — neither rocket science — that kept me writing code I was proud of:

1. Code in dedicated blocks of time.

Don’t multitask, and don’t try to squeeze in a few minutes between meetings. It takes time to establish a model, and it’s impossible to keep one alive while you’re responding to email or drive-by questions. Establish socially-acceptable cues to let people know when you need to be left alone — one thing I wish I’d done more for my teams is to set this up as an official practice. As an aside, this is why open offices are such horsesh*t for creative work — sometimes you just need a door.

2. Always finish finished.

This is actually the one bit of “agile” methodology that I don’t despise. Break up code into pieces that you can complete in one session. And I mean complete — all the error cases, all the edges, all of it. Whatever interface the code presents — an API, an object interface, a UX, whatever — should be complete when you let the model go and move on to something else. If you leave it halfway finished, the mental model you construct “next time” will be just ever so slightly different. And that’s where edges and errors get missed.

Finishing finished improves system architecture too — because it forces tight, compact modularity. For example, you can usually write a data access layer in one session, but might need to leave the cache for later. Keeping them separate means that you’ll test each more robustly and you’ll be in a position to replace one or the other as requirements morph over time. As an extra bonus, you get a bunch of extra endorphin hits, because really finishing a task just feels awesome.

OK sure, sounds great. But remember my friend Copper? In just the few sessions I’ve taken to write this little post, he’s come by dozens of times to play or make a quick trip outside. And even when I’m not paying him active attention, part of my brain always has to be on alert. Sometimes, distractions become so intense that the reality is you just won’t be successful at creative work, because your brain simply won’t focus. It hurts to say that, but better to acknowledge it than to do a crap job. The good news is that these times are usually transient — Copper will only be a brand new puppy for a few weeks, and during that time I just have to live with lower productivity. It’s not the end of the world, so long as I understand what’s going on and plan for it.

If you’re a manager, you really need to be on the lookout for folks suffering from Focus-killing situations. New babies, new houses or apartments, health problems, parent or relationship challenges, even socio-political issues can catch up with people before they themselves understand what’s going on. Watch for sudden changes in performance. Ask questions. Maybe they just need some help learning to compartmentalize and optimize their time. Or maybe they need you to lighten the load for a few weeks.

Don’t begrudge them that help! Supporting each other through challenging times forges bonds that pay back many times over. And besides, you’ll almost certainly need somebody to do the same for you someday. Pay it forward.