Busy Status Bar

> Eventually people will realize the light is busy when the person isn’t really busy

Like the geniuses that block off their whole day everyday on their calendar or set their Teams status to unavailable all day.

> the geniuses that block off their whole day everyday on their calendar

as someone who leaves themselves open to hear out others with their "hey do you have a second to check this out" ideas

y'all are missing out

True, and if someone tries to avoid communication in whatever way I highly doubt they actually work on meaningful tasks...

Or we work on meaningful tasks that require extended periods of focus and concentration.

Oh come on. There are lots of tasks where not avoiding communication will set you back long time or even prevent you from finishing the task at all.

I have checked your busy / free calendar information and it seems you do nothing around here. We thank you for your service but it is no longer required at this organisation.

Yea I always try to block off at least two days a week (ideally 3) of complete focus and move meetinga, conversation etc in other days. Both are useful and are needed

Doing this every day is a problem.

Doing it 1-2 days/week is the difference between being able to get some focus time to deliver something of value, and just being an internal search engine.

My job has lots and lots of calls. I am happy to leave most of my calendar open. But most mornings, and at least one full day every 2 weeks is mine, and no, you can't have it, you're not entitled to it, it's important to me I have that time to actually do focus work.

I obviously cannot speak for every business in every country, but at least in those I’ve worked at, you’d never get fired for based solely on the number of available slots in your calendar.

Unless you are some cerrah i highly doubt this.

Absolute skill issue. These kinda tasks usually demand lots of communication

What skill? Skill of ignoring notifications? And a lot of tasks don't require lots of communication. Maybe your tasks do.

I’ve blocked out 2 4 hour blocks for some work mandated sabbaticals for months now. It’s been great! People now remember the days and which block they can’t contact me, and work around it. It’s become such a successful thing that we recommend this to others within my team.

No one who is in engineering would say something like this. I can only conclude your job is auxiliary to engineering. In which case: I don't think someone who isn't an engineer should be talking about what is and isn't possible with respect to how engineers work. It's also a good idea that when engineers do tell you how they work -- not to ignore everything they say. Since Afterall -- you're not actually the one doing the job.

1 day every 2 weeks?!?!

I am a software engineer and most of them I have met throughout my career do not work on tasks that require 24/7 silence. Basic communication is important for every task and if you cant handle that you are simply not suited for the job.

I'm more in project management these days. It makes me laugh when an engineer says "I didn't get any work done today, as it was all meetings" - means I don't work for 20-30 hours/week.

The trick is balance for the role. For engineers it should be a lot more focus time, for PMs and managers it should be a lot more managers, but you should still be able to block out calendars for focus time if you need to - just not all day, every day, forever.

I've never noticed the busy indicator preventing people from asking me this question. And when I message others, the busy light is merely an indicator of how long I may need to wait for a response. My advice to anyone reading is not to be deterred by status lights and calendar blocks.

In my experience a lot of large corporations are absolute distraction machines.

Urgent message! It's time to complete your annual anti-bribery training refresher.

Urgent message! It's World Mental Health Day, and we're rolling out a new employee health and wellbeing policy.

Urgent message! Don't click 'yes' if you're offered an OS upgrade, crowdstrike doesn't support the new version.

Urgent message! All employees are required to complete mandatory training on chair usage. Click here to get started now!

Urgent message! The production website is down, please join the conference call we'd like to ask you about query explain plans.

Urgent message! Would you recognise a phishing attempt? Take 5 minutes to run through this refresher training and keep our corporate data secure.

Urgent message! The lyon office squash club is looking for new members.

A professional needs a strategy to stay productive despite the noise, while not missing the occasional needles in the message haystack.

Also don't forget the cow-orkers:

Urgent message! Do you have a moment for a quick call? [It's never quick.]

Urgent message! Hi $yourname.

Urgent message! Hi, so I hit this problem where this-and-this doesn't work. Here's an irrelevant part of the logs. We need to sort this before deployment tomorrow. [After couple of these, eventually your PM tells your team to stop fulfilling such requests from other teams, and instead first ask what the billing code for that is, or if they wouldn't rather file a Trac ticket.]

You’re not an engineer, so that comment isn’t relevant to you.

I have been Principal engineer at a company you have heard of, and hands-on CTO at multiple start-ups. I feel qualified in stating that my views hold across multiple job roles, from engineering to project management.