Jonathan Johnson

Remote talk for UCTech 2022 at UCSD.

The members of my team are hard to reach, they almost never answer emails right away, and you won't always find them hanging out in Slack. If you want to schedule a meeting with more than one of us you may need to wait days or weeks to find an available spot. In short we're busy doing Deep Work and freed from the demands of continuous communication our productivity is through the roof!

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep—spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way. - Cal Newport

We've been prioritizing deep work on our team for the last few years and have found the tangible productivity gains to be phenomenal. We're delivering higher quality sustainably and it shows in our product and engagement. Making time for focus required changing expectations about communication and availability that can be challenging to implement and difficult to defend.

In this session we'll talk about how I set a communication policy for our team that freed them from constantly checking email, slack, teams, and every other open conduit into our brains that steals focus; we'll discuss how we framed that policy for our leadership to get buy-in right from the start and how we made adjustments to ensure everyone could be reached in a crisis; and finally we'll talk about how we implemented "communication holidays" during the pandemic to give everyone time to breath, handle life, and get caught up on work and personal goals.