FoMO: Acronym for the “Fear of Missing Out”
What’s the first thing you do in the morning at the office? You check your email. You can’t start working in peace unless you’ve reached Inbox zero. And still you need to keep Outlook, Lync and Slack open “just in case”. Have you ever wondered why it is like this?
In principle, your company doesn’t expect you to have all these apps open. You should be able to design your working day as you want, as long as you deliver what you have to. But de-facto you are expected to be available. Even more when we talk about DevOps and so much collaboration is needed between teams that might even be geographically distributed. There seems not to be any other way!
Unfortunately, such a “FoMO-driven culture”, is not healthy for your organization. It starts killing productivity when let out of control.
In this talk we will be discussing some ways how to live with it, how we can keep it under control so that we can stay productive and not let it influence the DevOps culture in the wrong way.
20. DevOpsDays Stockholm 2017 @DaianyMargarita
We need the right balance in our
communication!
Thank you!
Editor's Notes
Hi everyone! My name is Daiany Palacios, I am a system analyst at Kühne + Nagel, a big logistics company with IT headquarters in Hamburg.
Today I’m gonna be talking about a cultural phenomenon which I believe has a very strong influence in our productivity. How many of you know what FoMO means? For those who don’t, it’s the so-called “Fear of missing out”.
What’s the first thing you do in the morning at the office? You check your email. You can’t start working in peace unless you’ve reached Inbox Zero. And still throughout the day you need to keep your email client, your chat client, Slack & Co. open “just in case”… right?
In principle, your company doesn’t expect you to have all these apps open. You should be able to design your working day as you want, as long as you deliver what you have to.
But de-facto you are expected to be available. Even more when we talk about DevOps and so much collaboration between people and teams is needed, there seems not to be other way!
The bad news is, such a “FoMO-driven culture” will sooner or later start killing productivity if let out of control. We definitely need to find the right balance in our communication. The good news is, there are a few ways to achieve this.
We just need a little bit of discipline and common sense. Please allow me to share with you some tips that have worked out for me and for other colleagues of mine as well. Here are my 3 main recommendations:
1. Limit your connectivity: it all starts with some self-discipline. Try to check your email once or twice a day only. Close all those apps! Just do it! If there is something really important, the news will reach you for sure, somehow (hey, telephones still exist after all).
Manage your notifications. We don’t really want all those notification bubbles popping up and distracting us each time, right? Seriously, self-interruption is a thing! So why not introducing some interruption-free hours?
2. Make better choices: Did you know that it takes an average of 23 min to get back on task after being interrupted? Frequent task switching is especially bad if the topics are not related, so try not to multi-task.
Do a brain-dump instead for example. Set your priorities straight and decide as well what not to do. The important point here is that you need to find your own routine. Something that works out for you.
3. Be disciplined and help each other: Communicate consciously. Use mailing lists properly for example, so that you don’t end-up spamming other people.
Pair more! It’s impressive how much higher the productivity is when doing pair programming, isn’t it?
A couple of development teams at my company have even brought it to the next level and they now do…
“Mob-programming”: the whole team works together at the same issue, at the same time, at the same room. It might sound crazy but it actually has increased their productivity by times.
Their lead times have been reduced and they are all very satisfied with the improved team performance. So if you never heard of it before, google it up and try it out, it’s a really good thing!
Now to recap a little, my recommendations are: limit your connectivity, make better choices, be disciplined and most important of all, help each other.
By doing all this, we are basically trying to reduce all those unnecessary interruptions to a minimum.
because the cost of so many interruptions is stress. And this can lead us in the worst case to an exacerbated FoMO, when we have get feeling of not being able to keep-up.
We start having higher levels of frustration, mental effort, feeling of time pressure and overall mental workload. We need to set boundaries. We can’t allow these feelings to affect our performance or maybe even our personal lives.
We, humans, are the main components of any organization. If we are stressed, we can’t possibly think deeply and achieve flow in our tasks, and this is bad for innovation and speed in whatever context we work on.
Now, DevOps is all about collaboration and empathy between people and teams.
But I strongly believe that we need to keep reasonable expectations placed on people and most of all, find the right balance on our communication to give everyone the space they need.
Remember, it’s all about having a healthy collaboration culture!
Thank you