 Felly, yna 11.26. Rydyn ni wedi cyfnod a'r bwrdd yn fawr yn ysgrifwyr ar draws byddai 35 ymlaen. Felly, rydyn ni'n gallu fod yn ymgyrch. Fy oedd iawn, rydyn ni'n haner. Rydyn ni'n gefnod i'r ddau. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r cynhyrchu o'r byd, a'r gwneud o'r bwysig yn rhaid. Rydyn ni'n ffasgau ymwysig o'r bwysig o'r lefnod ymlaen. How many times have you seen that this week? This is exactly the same as all those others. Before we get started, I just wanted to briefly mention a monumental moment that happened this morning and celebrate it. I achieved inbox zero. Yes, that's right. I know I am that good at my job. I have got through all of my email in one morning. Of course I'm joking because my job is a lot more than just reading and responding to email, but how many of us have ever shared a little brief moment of triumph when we make an achievement like that, when we get through our inbox and how ridiculous that feels. And it's not just email that's the problem. It's all of the different technology that we use and so today I'm going to talk about how we can manage our relationship with those application of those technologies better to not just improve our productivity but to improve our wellbeing. It seems ridiculous but a lot of us spend up to 50% of our time reading and responding to email and messages. No one's ever going to ask you that in an interview. No one's ever going to orient you in a new team and say, oh hey, by the way, in this organisation we check our email 36 times an hour. But that's exactly what most of us do. A recent study by the University of New York found that the average worker in an office environment will check their email 36 times an hour. Does anybody really need to do that? And of course, it's not just email that's the problem. We've got so many more mediums and applications that we use to communicate and talk to each other that we actually end up communicating with people via different channels about different topics simultaneously. And all of these technologies are competing for our attention day in, day out and nobody is immune to this kind of digital disruption because this is the digital disruption of our minds and how our brains are working. So, like I said, today I'm here to talk about information overload, interruptions and distraction. I'm going to share some of the things that I've tried to try and break out of this cycle and a little bit of the science around why we even behave like this. But first I just want to share a few more startling statistics about the way we use our technology today. So the average person checks their phone 80 times a day. If you're a millennial, you're actually more inclined to do that. You're more inclined to check your phone more like 150 times a day. A recent piece of research done by Dscout found that the average user will touch their smartphone. They might not even open it but they'll just touch it. 2,617 times a day and if you're one of the heaviest users it could be up to 5,427. We're addicted to our devices and we find it really hard to disconnect. As employees we generally experience only 11 minutes of uninterrupted focus at any one time. And when we are interrupted it takes an average of 23 and a half minutes to regain focus and resume the task that you were doing previously. And when you think about all of this you start to wonder how does anything ever get done. And that's exactly how a lot of us feel during our working lives. How many times have you got to the end of the day and you've sort of reflected on what you achieved and you haven't actually started your real work. You haven't actually started that one big thing that you thought you were going to crack on with that day because you've been doing busy work instead. You've been communicating, you've been responding to messages, you've been reading and absorbing information but that thing that your company pays you to do you didn't quite get round to doing that. And in the context of working in technology I think this is an even greater problem because as developers and engineers we really hate interruptions and we find them even harder to manage in our day to day work than a lot of other people. I think we can all relate to that feeling where you're maybe trying to root cause an issue or you're trying to solve a problem and you have that flicker of a light bulb moment in the back of your mind and you think you might be onto something and then all of a sudden you're interrupted either in person or through a notification and you lose that thread and you're so frustrated in that moment and it takes you maybe five, maybe ten, you know, 23 and a half minutes to actually get back to where you were before you were interrupted. I think Joel Bolski, CEO at Stack Overflow put this really well. I don't agree with everything he posts online but he says developers need to concentrate. The more things you can keep in your head at once, the faster you can code by orders of magnitude. And I think this just really highlights that we kind of all understand this as a shared problem. We understand that as a profession we need to be able to concentrate and focus to do our best quality work and sometimes we're not creating the best environments for ourselves to do that. One study that measured the productivity across 10,000 developers found that as a programmer you're likely to just get one uninterrupted two-hour session of work in a day. And when I read this I thought two things. I thought that's really bad and then I thought my team don't even get that. You know, for some people one uninterrupted two-hour session would be an amazing thing but imagine if we could improve this only slightly. Imagine the benefits that we would have in terms of what we could achieve as individuals and as a collective, as an organisation. And I know what you're thinking. This doesn't apply to me and actually I'm really great at multitasking. I can do all of these things at once and it doesn't affect my productivity. I'm actually quite good at this. And so many people have said that to me but I'm here to tell you that the cognitive losses from multitasking are greater than the cognitive losses from smoking weed. You might as well be sat at your desk getting high if you're sat there multitasking. It's actually been demonstrated that context switching so frequently and multitasking throughout your day can reduce your IQ by up to 10 points. No one wants that but the problem is, as I said, a lot of us feel like we're actually quite good at it and that's because our brains are lying to us. Multitasking actually creates a dopamine feedback loop in the brain and your brain really loves that dopamine. Our brain is a little dopamine addict and we're getting these tiny little chemical rewards every time we task switch, every time we do this busy work which actually isn't maybe achieving very much and we're being rewarded for it. It's actually been shown that the people who believe they're good at multitasking are actually the worst at it because they have a greater addiction to this dopamine than maybe someone who does consider the multitasking to be a problem. Not only that but multitasking increases the production of stress hormones so we're talking about cortisol and adrenaline and if we overproduce these hormones it can actually impact the clarity of our thinking. It can leave us feeling confused and having scrambled thoughts. So multitasking isn't just bad for productivity, it's actually bad for you physiologically as well. And if the little dopamine addict in your head isn't bad enough, self-interruption is a thing as well. So if your brain doesn't have any interruptions going on at any one time, actually it doesn't really matter because it'll just interrupt itself. The same goes the neurons that fire together, wire together. So the more we take on this busy work, the more we go into this multitasking mode, the more habitual it becomes. So the more likely you are to self-interrupt. Have you ever picked up your phone for no apparent reason? There was no notification, you've just picked up your phone and you've opened it, you've started doing something completely separate. I do this and I get incredibly frustrated with myself and I'm like why am I on Twitter again? Put the phone down. And the other thing about self-interruption that I find fascinating is that it increases proportionally to the amount of external interruption that you experience during your day. So the more you are interrupted, the more you are going to interrupt yourself. So the more notifications we receive, the more fire and forget emails that we receive, the more email we send, the more we and our colleagues are going to self-interrupt during the following hour after we do that. So we're creating this vicious cycle where we're all doing this busy work and we're actually all causing each other to interrupt more. If it's not external, then it'll be internal. But this is not a talk about productivity, although there for sure is a productivity problem for a lot of people now due to the relationship with technology. There are actually emotional and physiological consequences of this behaviour and of this relationship with technology. So I'm going to talk about some of those for a while. Has anyone heard of email apnea? So the term email apnea was coined over 10 years ago by a researcher called Linda Stone at Microsoft. And the definition of email apnea, and probably if you extend that into the technology environment today, we should just call it application apnea, is the shallow breathing or breath holding while doing email or working or playing in front of a screen. And I think this is really interesting because I notice myself doing it too. Now that I know it's a thing, I notice it and you might notice it when you go back to your desk. And you think this is ridiculous. I don't change how I breathe when I'm working in front of a screen, but you do. 80% of us do. And the problem, we're changing such fundamental things like how we breathe, how we're taking oxygen. It can influence our stress levels. It can influence our emotional well-being. And all of those things impact our ability to work effectively. It also affects how well we sleep. A lot of us sleep with our phones next to our beds. And a recent study that was done in the UK found that one third of UK adults checked their mobile phone during the night. So we're not even unplugging when we're supposed to be resting and recharging. We're checking our mobile phone during the night. Do any of your colleagues expect you to be doing that? I mean, genuinely. And part of the environment we're working in today means that we do work with people all over the world. And we have this notion that we need to be always on and always available, always connected. And we can neglect fundamentally important things like sleep as a result. Some other stats, 10% of us check our phones as soon as we wake up or hold my hand up. I do that. 52% of us check our phones within 15 minutes of waking. And reading from a device that emits blue light just before bed can actually impact the production of melatonin. So this is your natural sleep hormone. And that impacts the quality and duration of your sleep. We're having very real physiological impacts on our bodies when we engage with our devices in this way. And just in case you forgot, I hope you haven't, sleep is really important. Lack of sleep can be linked to obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, as well as a host of other medical conditions. We need sleep so much. There's also an emotional aspect to how we engage with some of our applications that goes a little bit deeper than just a little flutterings of jealousy when we see that someone's having amazing time on holiday or on Facebook. Is anybody heard of FOMO? FOMO is the fear of missing out and I think these are highly connected lives result in a lot of FOMO. There's always something going on, there's always something new and the urge to find out what that is can be overwhelming and it can be addicting. Being disconnected from your smartphone can cause feelings of anxiety and stress. I saw an amazing talk the other day where the speaker, I think he was a technology psychologist from ThoughtWorks and he said that we're basically already cyborgs. We don't say my phone battery is dead, we say my battery is dead. We don't say my phone is disconnected, we say I am disconnected. We're already extending our sense of self into these devices and I think that's true and I don't think it's necessarily problematic but I think it's something that we all need to be aware of. The internet is a great source of information but there is always more information there. You could read things on the internet all day long and you would never ever be able to stop. You would never get to the end. There's always someone that knows more about a topic than you and all of these things can contribute towards imposter syndrome. They can make you feel like you don't know enough that you're not doing enough. That can give you a sense that you don't have control. It's not just the fact that maybe our working lives are controlled by our inboxes. Maybe we consider our inboxes our to-do list, it's not by the way. We can feel like we don't have control over how we spend our time. If we're constantly responding to other people we sort of lose that sense of control over what we are doing and where our focus is and that can eventually result in burnout. I'd like to do a little bit of an experiment in FOMO. I'm going to challenge everybody in this room to put their phones and their laptops away for the remaining 15 minutes of this talk and just to experience what that feels like. If you get the urge to reach for your phone, to touch your phone, to tweet something, just recognise that in your mind. Maybe if we've got time for Q&A afterwards you can share your experiences with that because it is hard. To disconnect for only 10 minutes is incredibly hard. Now that I have your attention I'm going to start talking about how the brain works. If the human brain was so simple that we could understand it we would be so simple that we couldn't. I'm going to keep this at incredibly high level. I'm not a psychologist but this basic understanding of how our brains work has helped me change some of my habits. So I'm going to start by talking about the attentional system. There's basically four key components of the attentional system. One is the filter. The second is the central executive mode. We have mind wandering mode and the attentional switch and they're all pretty self-explanatory but I'll run through them one by one. So the attentional filter is the part of the brain that takes all of the input from your senses and decides what information needs to be escalated to your conscious mind. So you're in the room now and your skin is sensing the temperature. But you're not actively thinking about the temperature in this room unless your brain thinks you're really cold. Unless you're really cold. If the temperature changed by maybe five, ten degrees in either direction that information might then be escalated to your conscious mind and you might decide to do something about it. We're not necessarily thinking about the light levels in this room but if the lights went off we'd notice. The central executive mode is the system that allows you to direct your attention. This is the part of the brain that you engage when you're working, when you're doing active problem solving. This is sometimes referred to as top down thinking and it's the opposite of mind wandering which is where you let your thoughts wander aimlessly without purpose. Mind wandering mode, I think a lot of people relate to this when they're driving. So if you're driving and you don't remember a single thing about the journey from when you got to A to B it's probably because you've engaged mind wandering mode. And you've just let your thoughts go off in their own direction. And then finally there's the attentional switch. So this is part of the brain called the insular and it does exactly what you would expect. This is the part of the brain that you engage when you context switch, when you multitask, when you flip from one thing to another. And the thing about the attentional switch is it can get really tired. The more you multitask, the more you drain the resources that you have in this part of your brain which could lead to even less control about where you apply your focus and how you engage that central executive mode. So just going through some of these concepts about how the attentional system works in your brain helps you realise what happens to you when you receive a notification. Maybe you're in the middle of something and your phone lights up and your peripheral vision. That is your attentional filter bringing something into your conscious mind that wouldn't otherwise have been. Maybe you've had a really busy morning where you've had lots of correspondence and you feel absolutely exhausted by lunchtime. That's because you're wearing out your attentional switch. You've switched too often and you've tired out those parts of your brain you need in order to stay on task. Another cruel trick of the mind is the novelty bias. This is basically when the attentional filter is vulnerable to shiny new things and I think we can all relate to this as well. I have a particular weakness for certain apps so I can ignore email pretty effectively but if I get an e-message or a WhatsApp my curiosity can't take it and I have to read that straight away. So I definitely experience this novelty bias. The novelty bias goes some way to explain this behaviour. I'm just going to leave this here for a moment and let you digest that. That's how little self-control we have. If you ask somebody how long their email will sit in their inbox before they read it they'll tell you ten minutes. But a recent study by the University of New York found that if you look at the data on average you'll read that email within six seconds of receiving it. This is during your working day. I think that's a shocking statistic actually because I think when you as a person send email you're not expecting the recipient to be opening it straight away. I don't think anybody can honestly say that their job requires them to read every email within six seconds. So why are we doing this to ourselves? It's that curiosity. It's that novelty bias. We want to know what it says even if it's not important. We also have a completion bias so this is the little dopamine addict in our heads again rewarding us for completing a lot of small tasks instead of taking on the big ones. So this is the part of the mind which will encourage you to do all of your email first thing in the morning even though it's not the most important thing you need to do. It's the part of your brain that will encourage you to reply instantly to an email rather than thinking about it and responding later or even deprioritising it to the next day. The thing about our focus is that it's finite. Your brain makes up 2% of your body mass but burns through 20 to 30% of the calories. You need fuel for your brain and when that fuel runs low we're less able to think clearly. We're less able to do our jobs. So I'm going to talk about some of the things we can do to improve that and to help ourselves make better choices about how we use technology. There's this thing called configuration that you might have heard of. All of these notifications you have complete control of how and when they interrupt you. But very few of us actually update those default settings or switch them off at certain times of the day. There's a lot that you could do with your devices now if you just make a conscious decision to go and update those. I would encourage everybody to do that. Getting things out of your mind so that they don't worry you constantly is a great way to focus. So if you know there's an email that's come in or maybe you just write yourself a note like oh make sure you respond to so and so later. And then it stops distracting you. It stops troubling you. You're less tempted to go back to that thing that you know you really shouldn't be going back to and staying on task. Sorting tasks that are similar also helps with managing them so maybe you do need to respond to email. We all do sometimes but why don't you do that all at once and do it at a time of day where maybe you're not at your best from development or a problem solving point of view. I think you might have got the message already but don't multitask. I know it feels really good. I know that dopamine is really addictive but the more you try to multitask the less you're going to get done. Recognize that the routines that work for other people might not work for you. Experiment. Do different tasks at different times of the day and see what works. I can tell you hand on heart that I can get so much done in the morning. I'm absolutely at my best in the afternoon especially after lunch. I slump. The problem is I'm really tempted to do all my busy work in the morning because it gives me a great sense of achievement to read and respond to all of my email. But that leaves me in the afternoon with big project work to do and I'm just not in the best state of mind to do it. So I actually try not to do my email first thing in the morning. I try to do my creative problem solving first thing in the morning. And finally it's really important to decide not what not to do. There's always more work. There's always more that you can do and sometimes you just have to be honest with yourself that you're not going to get it all done and make a conscious decision about what you're not going to do today. And that frees you up to do the things that are really important. Nap driven development is something I'm a big fan of but did you know that a well timed 15 minute nap can actually increase your IQ by around 10 points? It refreshes your mind. It refuils that oxygenated glucose that you need to focus and to stay on task. If you are like me and you have trouble concentrating in the afternoon and if you're like me and you work from home, take a 15 minute nap. It'll do wonders. And there's some other things that you can do to refuel your mind as well. So I've talked about naps but if you can't take a nap make sure you take a regular break. Get away from your desk. Even better, get outside into nature. It's been shown that even if you look at a picture of a natural landscape, it's de-stressing as a human being. So try to get outside. Try to get into nature as often as you can. Don't skip meals. That oxygenated glucose comes from somewhere you have to eat. Don't skip breakfast. It's actually been shown that chewing gum improves your focus. Something about increasing the blood flow to your brain or that changing behaviour can actually really help. So maybe you can't get out of the office for 20 minutes but you can chew gum. Allow yourself to engage that mind wandering mode throughout certain parts of the day. None of us can stay on task all day every day. We have to allow our brain to operate in both modes. Actually a lot of creativity can be derived from allowing your mind to wander. Finally, having a hobby. This is something that definitely works for me in terms of de-stressing and decompressing at the end of the day. I like to draw. If I'm drawing, I'm not thinking about anything else. I'm not thinking about work or what's in my inbox. I'm probably agonising a little bit too much about whether my drawing is any good. But just having a hobby, playing a sport, cooking a meal, these things engage a different part of your brain and help you to refuel and reset ready to take on the next task. I'm sure a lot of you are aware of the benefits of meditation but I wanted to call that out as well. Practising focused attention makes you more aware of where your attention is and when it drifts. It makes you better at resetting where that attention is. It improves your focus when you're not meditating as well and it actually changes your brain. The areas of the brain linked to attention and sensory processing are thicker in people who meditate than those who don't. So you're literally flexing those muscles in your brain and giving them a workout so that you can use them to greater good when you're not meditating as well. In our work environment we can do things that help each other, that help improve other people's experience as well. So just talking about it, if you find that some people are particularly bad at interrupting you, have that conversation and be like actually you know what this is causing me a problem, maybe we can adapt how we communicate with each other. Introducing interruption free hours can be really powerful especially in development teams. Having certain times of the day where you know people are unavailable and know when they're available makes it a lot easier to set expectations about response times for messages. As I said, I think everybody is different and everyone has a routine that suits them. Flexible working allows everybody to work in their own individual way and I think it's a great thing. Think again about open plan offices for obvious reasons but like I said, the more you are interrupted the more you will self-interrupt. So open plan offices are not great for that. There are a lot of reasons why you can self-interrupt in an open plan office and more interruptions as well. Be really intentional about your communication. Like I said, if you think about the recipient of your emails opening that email within six seconds, be a bit mindful about when or how you send that email. Don't fire off messages all day throughout the day. Be a bit more intentional about how and when you communicate with people. And pairing. This is something we advocate for at Pivotal and actually it increases your resiliency to interruptions. One, because you're accountable to someone else, you're less likely to pick up your phone and start scrolling through social media if you're sat next to somebody else who you're engaged in a task with. It also helps with your short term memory. So maybe you have found that thread of an idea that might result in the solution to a problem and then you get interrupted. Some interruptions are unavoidable but at least you have another person there. You've been working out loud and together you're more likely to go back to that task and find that thread of an idea than if you're on your own. So I want to wrap up now by saying what does any of this have to do with Cloud Foundry? Obviously not a lot but we're all here in Boston at this summit to talk about transformation, to talk about making enormous changes to our working environments, to the technologies we use and the practices that we use. In my opinion, this all becomes a lot easier if we start with ourselves, if we transform how we work and we act, if we're more mindful and more intentional about where we apply our focus, if we cut out the distractions and we cut out the noise and we apply ourselves to the problems that are really the most important that day, then I think we have a much better chance of success. Thank you everybody for having me. I don't know how much time we have but I was just going to sort of open it up and ask if anybody experienced any FOMO just then. Just give me a show of hands. Did anyone get any FOMO? Yeah. Did anyone touch their phone? Yeah. Can't believe it. Shocking. Okay, I'll forgive you. Anyway, thanks everyone for coming. Thank you.