Jonathan Blow on Deep Focus
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- Опубликовано: 2 окт 2024
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Here's a short clip showing Jonathan Blow - a US game designer and programmer who's most known for Braid (braid-game.com/) and The Witness (the-witness.net/). Jonathan talks about how working away from the office helped him to get into a deeper focus state.
This is part of a longer interview. The full portrait can be seen at • Jonathan Blow on Deep ...
(Thanks to Siolo and Andrew, and all project patrons)
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OMG. He has put into words what I've felt for so long.
Exactly
Holy shit. Every time I listen to him it feels like a more eloquent version of myself looked inside my mind.
i feel ya
OMG Absolutely nails my experience as a programmer of 25+ years. It's like you spend 45 minutes building a sandcastle in your head, and once that castle is built, Then you can really start changing it, but one good interruption, and boom.. the whole castle is gone.. and has to be reconstructed by rebuilding it from memory, and reading the code. If you work in an office with an open floorplan, those interruptions come at regular intervals.. you commute.. you get to work.. you get coffee.. you might get the castle build and maaybe make some tweaks.. then lunch hits.. after lunch, you're tired, digesting, but you build up the castle.. maybe get a couple hours of productive work, assuming no meetings or other attendent office minutia.. and then clock out. But a good weekend binge on a passion project at home, i'll crank out 20 hours straight, and that castle is REAL the whole time.. and I can have amazing productivity. But then there's laundry... And I think this is what ends up leading to burnout. Being in a constant state of emotional interruption or threat of interruption hits a threshhold where your mind can't get there anymore and it starts a chain reaction. Balance..
In the book "Peopleware", the authors Timothy Lister & Tom DeMarco mention how 3 strategically placed incoming phone calls (I think it was 3. Maybe it was 5) can destroy any programmer's productivty for the day. So true.
Anyway, thanks for your comment!
maybe 3 days of solitude, and 2 days of team-effort and feedback would be best. (and 2 days sports/hobbies/relaxation/socialize)
+Ultimo Games I love reading all these books about how best to live a productive life. Favorite at the moment: Rest, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. Check it out!
know thyself
@@OnDoubt Might want to check out Sam Ovens on focus.
The reason the threat of being interrupted makes it harder to focus in that specific way, is because your mind needs to be totally clear with no other thoughts going on as you said. And since you have a clear goal of maintaining that focus without being interrupted, the idea that you could be interrupted and that that would interfere with your goal causes anxiety on some level. You worry about being interrupted. Anxiety/worry in all of its forms is just thoughts, at various levels of consciousness, about things you don't want to happen that might/will/did happen. The higher the possibility of interruption, and the more you care about focusing, the higher your anxiety will be, the more worrying/anxious thoughts you will have, the less focused you will be(in that specific way).
I know exactly what Jonathon Blow is talking about here, when I am programming/brainstorming/designing, I have to keep my door shut AND locked, so that nobody can barge in and completely interrupt me, and of course so that people walking by in the hallway won't distract me. Especially when nobody else is in the house, I can think noticeably better about these kinds of concepts/ideas.
+Maurice Nowicki to me, locking the door can sometimes not be good enough - someone can still come and start knocking :)
But I agree with you (and Jonathan): the idea of being interrupted is a huge thing!!
guy is not married that’s for sure 😂😂
So this is where meditation can help I guess. It trains your mind to disregard unimportant(i.e. at the moment) stuff
+xedemx especially for mental noise, right? For me exterior noise isn't easily disregarded through meditation - especially in the described situation of wanting to work.
What's your experience?
I agree, you can dampen external noise via meditation, but it will be there. It have given me a greater range of work activities which I can carry out with external noise. I am not sure if you can get to a level where you can filter every situation, I certainly can't :D
Ah yes that crazy 4-slot charm in Hollow Knight
Facts! I've been having the same experience since I've started an actual team project and whenever somebody needs me to do something from my team, it prevents me from going into focusing. I'm actually trying to fix this issue with caring less, ignoring and keeping me focused, so I can actually make the work that they need. Actually thinking constantly about somebody that needs me to do something causes the problem so that's why ignoring the things will fix all of them.
This is why I don't have my phone in my pocket when I'm at home / working / coding
Yes! At work I don't have the option of spending time at a coffee shop. I find a few minutes locked in a toilet cubicle to be a workable second-best method of avoiding the threat of mental interruption when coding.
Deep focus exists in an imaginative space supported by abstract reasoning and short term memory. Your goal is clear. All parts of your problem is in mind. You think your way through it, around it, under it, and above it, taking it apart, putting it back together, familiarising yourself with the puzzle until you can readily and reliably reference any part of it from your short term memory.
You don't realise this is where it is being referenced from however, so when you are disrupted by a request that makes you solve an unrelated problem that needs you to retrieve information from your long term memory, you baulk as your state of 'flow' is stymied by being genuinely lost in your own long term memory without the thing which you next need being as immediately accessible to being referenced as everything during your 'flow state' which leads to your abstract reasoning process "tripping over itself" and then becoming preoccupied with why, suddenly, you are stuck.
When you aren't stuck, you are just momentarily disrupted. If you then become distracted and preoccupy yourself with another problem entirely, then you will flush out your short term memory and have to re-load that 'cache' with what you had in there before, but as you never bothered to consciously 'serialise' your imagination into your long term memory (perhaps, because you are deferentially expected to respond immediately to your senior coworker or boss who has rung your desk telephone without regard for the productivity hit he is inflicting on his company), the effort to resume the first focused task involves reconstructing it almost from first principles, and you may not get it in your mental landscape the same way as before.
Imagine entering a blacksmith's forge.
A big burly guy with a thick leather apron on is hammering on some red hot metal he has just pulled out of fire. You can see big orange sparks flying off it as it is shaped around the anvil. It is noisy. The metal's glow will diminish. It will be thrust into a bucket of water. Steam will issue forth.
When do you speak to him during that?
Holy shit, this explains so much about how I code
so true that programming requires deep concentration
I can relate with every J's comment and I'm a dev as well. What noticeably helped me is getting away from social networks (facebook is gone for almost a year, twitter almost there). Social networks generate a lot of noise and anxiety, everything you definitely don't need to reach flow / deep focus.
+Oswaldo Ferreira ha - I hear you. My best days are with the phone and all social media not used before 5pm. At all.
Magical flows are made like this :)
I had the same problem and solution:)
Great! :D When will be the full interview released?
+Weltenbruch it will be a while for the editing to feel right. You can follow this channel and it will pop up eventually :) Sorry to not be able to offer st more specific.
Okay thank you :D I will keep an eye on the channel :)
Bump to this question! :D
Weltenbruch Still waiting
Weltenbruch still waiting
Yeah, totally. I come to think of this as your mind trying to spend mental resources trying to keep hold of important details that might be useful if your actions are questioned, or if you need to share an idea. When there are other's around that' could question you, we try to hold space for a group context, especially with people we've had intense emotional experiences in the past.
So true! The interruptions are the worse. There's nothing worse than programming for one project for an hour and in the middle of it have a colleague call you to discuss a completely different project. It interrupts all the order you had created in your mind to come up with a solution to program and forces you to start all over, or nearly, again.
+Seb B I once read that by strategically placing four phone calls within a working day, any programmer's productivity can be turned down to zero.
I think that's quite likely.
Yeah. It's definitely very frustrating having your thoughts of how you were going to program something interrupted. Also colleagues who are not programmers think you can instantly just turn from one programming project to the other and instantly you will remember every line of code you wrote and the logic process behind them. :) So frustrating.
+Seb B when I first was a game developer, back in 2000, I remember bugging the poor dev next to me about this and that and bla and more bla - until he nearly lost it, because I didn't realize he was focusing a super complex task, from which I was constantly interrupting him.
Even as a dev I didn't yet get it :)
Btw, that was Erwin Kloibhofer of Lomax and Flink fame - the tech mind working with Henk Nieborg :)
:) I can imagine! Thankfully I work from home now and get minimum interruptions. I can also focus on my personal programming projects a lot better. I do have to force myself to have some human interaction now and then.
+Seb B that's my today's situation as well. I think overall, I like it better.
Makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Thinking burns up glucose. You want to save that glucose for when you're sure you can use it efficiently
He worded that beautifully, i can really relate to what he's saying regarding distractions. Time to find a peaceful coffee shop!
The Witness' link is broken.
and this why I can’t stand Agile practices
this dude gets it 😂
and when you work remote theres no relaxing anywhere
Bob Martin in "The Clean Coder" actually says that the state of "flow" or "being in the Zone" is bad for the end result -- the code.
what would be the reasoning behind that ?
From my experience when I am focused for a long while I end up with better results in terms of code structure and overall design.
uncle bob has said a lot of silly stuff with no evidence supporting it. I woudln't worry.
The state uncle Bob is referring to is a tired and less conscious state. I think he would agree with Blow that having no interruptions and knowing you will not be interrupted will allow for clearer thoughts. These interruptions would be more akin to the negative affects of context switching.
+InnerscopeC I second that
Lev Bobrov if Bob Martin would actually code instead on writing books about it he would not say that rubbish.
Thuper therious programming guyths