Deep Pairing

[singularityhacker]

Is deep work the only mode of getting the most of our vocational time? Cal Newport made it famous and made a believer but doe that mean that interactions with our peers are a necessary evil and less than ideal? If this is the case then it would appear that the remote work shift is an unmitigated win. I'm going to argue that there are actually two modes of deep productivity and not just one. There is deep work categorized by prolonged solitary undisturbed focus and there is a second mode I will be calling deep collaboration or deep pairing.

• As resistant we are to deep work, we are equally resistant to deep pairing
• We should invest the same intensity to engagement and being in the moment in pairing sessions as we are in solitary deep work sessions
• I am purposively not using thee word meeting to distinguish it from what we typically think of meetings and what meetings typically are
• I realized there was a problem in meetings after the COVID lockdown happened. The "no device" rule couldn't apply.
• The effectiveness of our engineering quarantine times was going to be of less than useful if people could not get engaged with the what of what we were doing and why we needed to do it.
• There is no zoom fatigue when you focus on sharing your screen and not your faces.
• Deep pairing is closer to working sessions than meetings.
• This is a proven practice taken from Extreme Programming know as pair programming.
• People are paying to have strangers watch them work (https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/focusmate-review-productivity-work-hack and https://www.watchmework.com/)
• Include the quote from Cal Newport about the use of Scrum ceremonies
• Link out to Going Distributed paper
• Deep pairing is the knowledge workers version of pair programming (whatever advantages it says there are get to be enjoyed by all knowledge workers)
• Deep pairing symbiotically relates to deep work because, without it, one can go deep down the wrong path and without deep work, there is nothing to pair on.
• Work through all the literature written on running the perfect meeting as well (remember this one: https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/oprah-winfrey-uses-same-3-sentences-to-get-every-meeting-off-to-perfect-start.html)

[singularityhacker]

Add stuff from the “there is no speed limit” blog post.

[singularityhacker]

Investigate things like being present from Earhart tolled for ways to focus the mind