focus
Bridgid and I don't have many conflicts, but one of the things that forces us to compromise is the fact that we both match well-known gender stereotypes when it comes to our work habits and attention spans. This can be amusing and frustrating at the same time.
For those of you who never made it through Psych 101 and don't work for a company that requires lots of diversity training, allow me to summarize: men are incredibly single-minded and perform well on tasks that require deep concentration, long hours, and not talking to anyone; women are excellent multi-taskers who are most productive when they are faced with disparate tasks that exercise social as well as academic skills. This is why you meet so many male programmers and female marketing executives. There are exceptions, but in my experience this stereotype is more accurate than most[1].
In fact, in the case of me and Bridgid, it is incredibly accurate. Bridgid is a biochemist who gives cancer to fish and does experiments on "genes". The fact that she's a geek would lead you to believe that she is an exception to the female stereotype, and in many ways, she is; however, when it comes to multi-tasking and the desire to work on disparate tasks, she is a perfect match. Bridgid can switch contexts almost immediately and not lose a step. Her need for long-term scheduling is limited to her need to set up multi-day experiments in such a way that she can balance her classes with her time in lab.
I am a different animal. I exhibit classic programmer behavior when I'm at work, and it's even more obvious after work, when there are no meetings to distract me. I like to block off hours of time for one project, one feature, or one set of related bugs. I save big-ticket items for days when I work from home so that any communication that I have with other people is routed through email or IM, which allows me to manage it in the same way that I manage my list of tasks. Even when I'm working on a feature that touches code shared by multiple people and requires lots of questions and communication, at some point I will buckle down and write code by myself, with no distractions to knock down the house of cards I am building in my head.
Context switches can kill hours of my day if they are timed right: three consecutive meetings with thirty minutes in between each means that I lose an hour because I can't start anything significant before I'm pulled into the next meeting. The flip side of this is that, once I am working on something, I find it very hard to put it down. I wish that I had Bridgid's ability to let things go when a context switch happens; instead, it takes upwards of an hour for the thoughts surrounding whatever it is I'm working on to leave my brain. Of course, sometimes the delay is caused by thoughts about co-worker frustration or bureaucracy, but I think that is more understandable to the average person. Thinking about Ant's classloading behavior on the way to dinner is not.
The reverse of this behavior is interesting. A large project may require many days of intense concentration and occasional t-shirt re-use on my part, but when I'm done[2], I am suddenly aware of all of the great things that are happening around me. Things to do. Fun to be had. My non-programming intensity is as strong as my programming intensity, but the two cannot coincide. This can be very confusing for Bridgid and other female humans.
I try to temper this conflict by keeping an a personal schedule that extends at least two and usually three weeks in advance, identifying those times when I will be able to work consecutive days on larger problems without forgetting to eat or talk to my girlfriend; the other days become targets for meetings, smaller bugs, and tedious work that will not leave me distracted at the end of the day. This need for order and preservation means that I am constantly scheduling, with the ability to remake two weeks of plans in ten to fifteen minutes. Frequent re-ordering means that no "to do list" software is fast enough or natural enough for me; whether it's Microsoft Outlook or some Web 2.0 app with Atom feeds and rounded corners, I always come back to a plain text file on my desktop. I don't have time for calendar widgets and status markers. When something is re-scheduled, I cut and paste it. When it's done, I delete it. At the end of each day, I open todo.txt one last time, delete the current day's entry, Ctrl-S, Alt-F4, and turn off my monitor.
On that note, Fri PM (8/24) - blog post is complete. It's time for a trip to Fujisan. With my lady.
[1] I'm sure you've already thought of a few co-workers who completely defy these stereotypes. Good for you. I'm telling my story anyway.
[2] Where done means that it works on someone else's machine and I've found most of the edge cases.
Labels: culture, narcissism, programming
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