Dealing with noise and finding flow state

I remember getting my first work phone.

A BlackBerry Pearl.

It had a physical QWERTY keyboard, battery life for days, and what was, at the time, a genuinely revolutionary feature: push email. Messages appeared on the device the moment they were sent. No refreshing. No waiting. Just information, arriving uninvited.

At the time, this felt like the future. I was connected to a living organisation in real time. A sort of corporate hive mind.

Alright Neo, settle down.

The lasting legacy of the BlackBerry is not the hardware, or even email itself. It is the normalisation of push notifications for work, regardless of where you are. The quiet acceptance that information should interrupt you the moment it exists.

Control over when information is consumed shifted from the consumer to the publisher, and we mostly went along with it without asking too many questions.

A Blessing and a Curse

As with most things in technology, this shift is both a blessing and a curse.

Sometimes, immediate notification is genuinely critical. Other times, it is just noise. The problem is rarely a single notification. It is the barrage.

A constant drip of low-importance information demanding high-importance attention.

And for me at least, the notifications themselves are only half the problem.

The Anticipation of Interruption

The anticipation of interruption can be just as disruptive as the interruption itself.

Even when nothing is actively happening, part of your brain is waiting.

Waiting for:

• the Slack ping

• the Teams call

• the email that might be urgent, or might just be someone thinking out loud in a shared channel

That low-level vigilance quietly erodes your ability to concentrate. You are never fully focused, because you are never fully allowed to be unless your company plays its part in controlling the level of disruption employees face, and you take back control of your notifications. Taking back this control is arguably a core competency in a modern corporate environment.

I do not want to get on an engineer pedestal about how much focus and deep thinking time matters to us. It does matter, but it matters in plenty of roles beyond engineering.

Deep thinking is fragile.

Once broken (with the current context switched to something else), it is not trivial to resume.

Mornings for Thinking, Afternoons for Talking

Trying to do the hard work, the real thinking work, in between a noisy afternoon of meetings is almost impossible.

I am fortunate that I often have relatively clear mornings, and that is when meaningful progress tends to happen. The deep thinking lives there.

The afternoons are for:

• collaboration

• shared thinking

• alignment

All valuable. Just not compatible with deep focus.

Expecting both to coexist happily at the same time of day is optimistic at best. Ideally, if meeting-free time can be scheduled (ironically by adding a meeting for having no meetings), this can be hugely beneficial for focus.

Reducing the Noise (A Few Things That Help)

None of this is rocket science, but there are a few things I have found genuinely useful.

• Mute notifications from non-essential channels
  Just remove the assumption of immediacy. Take back control and retrieve the information when you have capacity to do so.

• Put your phone on Do Not Disturb
  With app exceptions for critical things like work MFA.

• Handle email asynchronously
  Create time to reply rather than responding the moment something lands. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon, if possible.

• Use Do Not Disturb in Slack or Teams and say so
  Tell your team you are focusing for the next few hours. Most people are reasonable if expectations are clear.

• Create Do Not Disturb exceptions selectively
  Add your manager or direct reports, if that helps reduce anxiety about missing something important.

• Auto-schedule Focus Time
  Microsoft 365 users can do this using Viva Insights. You can tell it to plan ahead to ensure you have a selected number of hours per day to focus.

It Is Not Just Work

I have mostly talked about work notifications here, but personal life can be just as noisy, particularly when working from home.

• Post arriving.
• Neighbours’ dogs barking.
• The window cleaner appearing at exactly the wrong moment.
• The washing machine finishing its cycle with a chirpy song that goes on for a bit too long (those with a Samsung know what I mean).
• One child’s school broadcasting an urgent message to say they have run out of chocolate pudding and will instead be serving toffee pudding.
• Another school messaging about exam timetables for GCSEs.

None of this is individually catastrophic.

Collectively, it adds up.

Putting It All Together and Finding Your Flow State

When I began software engineering over twenty years ago, Senior Engineers used to talk about this mythical thing called flow state.

A mental state where you are completely locked into a task. Where your brain does exactly what you ask of it and then some, on demand, without hesitation. Time disappears. Progress feels effortless. You look up and wonder how it is suddenly lunchtime, and you are dehydrated and bursting for the toilet.

This is not a state I can reach on demand.

What I have found, though, is that combining the tips above around managing noise is a solid starting point. Reducing interruption does not guarantee flow, but it does at least create the conditions where it has a chance of happening.

There is also a short-circuit that sometimes works for me.

Noise-cancelling headphones on. A music for concentration playlist on Spotify, or a lo-fi variant of whatever band or album I would normally listen to. Nothing with lyrics that demand attention or sing-along. Nothing too familiar that pulls me out of the task.

It does not work every time. But when it does, it feels unreasonably effective.

Closing Thoughts

This post has, in part, been a rant.

But if there is a point buried underneath it all, it is this:

Uninterrupted time does not happen by accident anymore.

If you want it, you have to plan for it. And occasionally, you have to mute the world to get anything worth doing done.

The BlackBerry may be long gone, but we are still living with the defaults it introduced.

It is probably overdue that we revisited them.

P.S. I can wholeheartedly recommend the BlackBerry movie as a great watch