I've been wrestling with the challenge of balancing deep, concentrated work with the demands of DevOps. It feels like my schedule is constantly swamped with urgent, last-minute tasks, making it tough to carve out time for meaningful projects that could really reduce our workload—like automation or better system design. I read about applying Cal Newport's *Deep Work* concepts to our field, such as time management strategies, limiting distractions from instant messages and emails, and even trying out 'mini think weeks' when I'm off call. I'm curious to hear how others manage to find time for deep, proactive work in such a chaotic environment. Any tips?
1 Answer
This topic is well covered in the first Google SRE book! When I was managing a team, I set up different queues for project work and for incidents. This separation helps since these task types require different mental approaches and have separate KPIs. It just makes sense because they're fundamentally different tasks with their own software needs.
Setting up separate queues really does help! I do the same to avoid context switching, depending on whether I'm on-call or not. It ensures we're working from distinct backlogs, and we can also set specific service level objectives for incident responses.