Strategies For Protecting Developer Productivity From Support Interruptions
Staying Focused While Supporting Others
Developers often struggle to balance writing new code and features with providing technical support for colleagues. The constant context switching between focused coding and addressing incoming questions can severely limit productivity. This article explores strategies and techniques developers can leverage to protect periods of focused work while still being responsive to organizational needs.
The Context Switch Tax
Context switching refers to the process of stopping one task, moving all relevant information out of your short-term memory, and loading a new set of data in preparation for a different task. This cognitive gear shift inflicts a heavy tax as both tasks must be restored and reexamined. For developers, the cost is measured in code quality, bugs introduced, and features not built. Understanding how costly even brief interrupts can be is key to mitigating associated losses.
The High Cognitive Load of Switching Tasks
Studies have shown that each time a developer context switches between tasks, up to 20 minutes can be lost reorienting to the new task. These productivity taxes accumulate over a day where developers context switch on average every 10-15 minutes. With frequent interrupts, developers struggle to stay focused, make more mistakes, are less motivated, and get less done. By scheduling fewer transitions between focused coding and support, higher quality work can be accomplished.
Measuring Productivity Losses from Interrupts
While anecdotal evidence abounds regarding the high costs of task switching for knowledge workers, quantifying productivity deltas has been challenging. However, analyzing computer interaction data has made measuring these losses easier. Studies examining timestamps between coding sessions, meetings, emails, and other common workplace interrupts have calculated average productivity hits per day. For developers, total losses ranged from 20-40%! Software changes were made in smaller increments and testing was cut short. Understanding the hard data around interruptions can motivate changes to reduce associated costs.
Strategies to Minimize Context Switches
Just as context switches inflict productivity losses, minimizing unnecessary interrupts can have outsized gains. Small individual effort reductions aggregate. Developers can take several approaches to proactively defend focused work time while still being available for organizational requirements.
Scheduling Focused Work Blocks
Studies across industries resoundingly show that long blocks of uninterrupted work time lead to greater productivity and innovation versus scattered, broken-up hours. While expectations may exist regarding immediate support response times, developers can work with managers and colleagues to protect stretches for focused coding. Clearly communicating planned offline work blocks reduces interrupts. Starting days with the most cognitively demanding coding before less intensive support tasks can also be effective.
Setting Expectations with Colleagues
Making support and coding expectations clear across teams ensures colleagues plan better for developer availability. Setting teamwide guidelines that lower priority questions wait for scheduled windows or using email instead of tapping someone live can help. Similarly, highlighting for business partners when deep coding blocks cannot be interrupted builds understanding. Well defined support standards and escalation paths allow coverage by others when developers are heads-down. Finally, providing visibility into workload balance and task switching costs builds empathy for focus needs.
Automating Repeatable Tasks
Automation offers tantalizing potential for eliminating repetitive, low cognitive load tasks that interrupt flow. While total elimination of human support remains unlikely in the near term, leveraging tools like chatbots, email classifiers, documentation portals, and ticket handling systems can meaningfully deflect interrupt volume. Developers can take inventory of common support questions and self-help scenarios to weigh automation potential. Building these capabilities does require initial investment, but productivity gains and capacity recovery outweigh costs.
Tools To Manage Support Requests
Thoughtfully designed and implemented tools provide developers added leverage managing incoming support volume and associated costs. Proactive tool adoption tailored to team needs can yield great efficiencies. Automation offers an intriguing path to reduce handle time and repetition allowing developers space for IC priorities. Common solutions fit several categories, often working in concert.
Ticket/Email Filtering Systems
Standardizing support intake via ticketing systems, augmented with automated categorization, routing, and response features offers major context switching relief for recurring inquiries. Email management tools similarly classify, sequence, and connect related conversations, providing insight into previously scattered data. Combining response templates and intelligent routing minimizes developer workload. Additionally, support queues with SLAs provide guidance for capacity balance, with lower priority tickets handled during scheduled support blocks by developers.
Chatbots for Common Questions
Basic Q&A chatbots offer 24×7 self-help resources that divert human support costs for the long-tail of frequent yet straightforward questions. Helping users quickly find answers without submitting tickets significantly reduces interrupts. Investing in a thoughtful taxonomy and dialog tree pays dividends focusing tool impact on top topics. Advanced NLU-powered bots handle more complex multi-turn conversations with contextual carryforward and ambiguity resolution. While still evolving, maturing solutions provide value, especially for common early lifecycle queries.
Documentation Portals
Wikis, knowledge bases, and internal Stack Overflow-style documentation collective portals centralize tribal knowledge and accelerate self-service. Developers can redirect colleagues to documentation libraries versus answering repetitive questions singly. Useful collection organization, search, version histories, and content health metrics drive impact. Documentation libraries combine great for leveraging chatbots as initial search front ends before ticket submission. Premium media wiki platforms help, but simple cloud docs or Confluence often suffice for getting started.
Balancing Productivity and Support
While support demands on developers will likely continue growing, better understanding associated costs enables more thoughtful balance between focused coding and team collaboration. Determining sustainable support levels is key, along with getting stakeholder buy-in on new models that ultimately benefit all. Developers play pivotal roles enabling organizational success via delivering innovation and should have space protected.
Determining Sustainable Support Levels
Both historical data establishment and organizational support discussions better forecast inbound support requirements. Analyzing past volumes and complexity shape estimates, supplemented by examining growth trends and team expansion plans. Developer participation ensures forecasts understand critical inquiry types that require deep technical handling versus automation/self-service potentials. Calibrating suitable support targets to minimize interrupt taxes while acknowledging real assistance needs is challenging yet invaluable.
Saying No Without Guilt
Despite growing experience levels, developers still often struggle declining support requests or clearly communicating coding focus needs. However, developers play critical innovation enablement roles across organizations and should prioritize work aligned to strengths without guilt or apology. Clearly explaining how focused work ultimately supports colleagues via better, faster solutions builds understanding and empowers better planned self-service.
Getting Stakeholder Buy-In
Developers alone cannot enact durable reductions in counterproductive support interrupts. Instead, collaborating cross-functionally to highlight productivity costs while advocating for change is key. Seeking leadership endorsement for protected coding intervals and laying expected self-help and automation foundations brings critical mass. Promoting enablement resources during launches and events further drives cultural shifts. With multi-prong awareness, developers more easily defend precious flow states.
Sample Support Workflow Automations
Basic automation is within reach for most developers, enabling quick reductions in repetitive support burdens that sabatage focus. While advanced solutions require greater specialization, foundational capabilities can be configured and coded. Many repetitive workflows yield opportunities for hand-off to chatbots, asynchronous processing, or straight through intake relief.
Auto-Replies for Out of Office
Scripted responses during PTO stretches preserve availability perceptions without actual mid-vacation interrupts for common yet deferrable questions. Custom replies also buy handling delays after hours for lower priority items or issues requiring deeper research. Auto-acknowledgements limit requester uncertainty while communicating SLA expectations.
Routing by Request Type
Basic ticket classification flows powered by keywords, regular expressions, or simple NLU quickly channel items to appropriate teams. Distributing support reduces individual burden. Classification accuracy improves over time via continuous active learning. Similarly, scripted rules can tag and sequence communication streams around key entities. Automated hand-offs limit manual processing and associated distractions.
Tagging for Follow-Up
Automated context recording and recall streamline previously disjointed, distraction prone support interactions into contiguous threads. Following dialogue state even through unrelated interrupts reduces cognitive load reprocessing earlier conversations. Critical insight around customer profile, environment details, dependencies tracked sans explicit lookups preserves productivity.
Key Takeaways
Developers play an essential innovation role across companies, yet frequently get pulled into significant support efforts that sabotage their ability to focus and code. While no silver bullet exists, leveraging proven strategies around scheduling, stakeholder expectation setting, automation, and self-service can effectively protect productivity. The costs of task switching and interrupt dilution accumulate while focused coding offers multiplicative gains. Keeping key lessons front of mind provides developers agency owning tradeoffs.
Reduce Context Switching for Greater Focus
Unnecessary interrupts inflict steep costs from cognitive loads to errors introduced to motivation drains. While zero task switching is impossible, developers should map workflows, quantify current costs, identify top distractors and work collaboratively to reduce change frequencies through scheduling adjustments, automation solutions, and self-help enablement.
Leverage Tools and Automation
The market offers mature and continuously improving tooling for automating repetitive support tasks and scaling self-service. While customization takes some investment, the long term productivity dividends make solutions like tickets queues, wikis, chatbots, and email classifiers worthwhile. Developers can take inventory of top repetitive support types, persona needs and volume snags to prioritize automations.
Set Boundaries While Still Being Helpful
Being available and helpful is important, but setting clear boundaries and planning focused work ensures higher quality innovation outcomes that actually enable organizational success faster. Getting leadership and colleague buy-in while still meeting reasonable support needs is key. Developers should set expectations, point to specific process changes like scheduling depth work or offering initial self-help resources. Small cultural shifts aggregate to better flows.
