In Praise of Pausing

There are two situations in which I appear to be doing nothing: when I am thinking and when I am in what I call the Safety Pause.

Thinking

The thinking case should be obvious: as a software designer and prototype builder, a good part of my job requires thought. Thinking, at least when I do it, look like particularly quiet goofing off, with a crucial difference: I am thinking.

I accept that believing that I am thinking and not day dreaming requires a leap of faith. In order to foster trust, I try to offer what proof I can, such as white papers, design notes,rapid coding that comes from a solid plan, etc. but I find that this is often not enough to convince some people. These people seems to feel that if my fingers are not on the keyboard then I am not working. God forbid that I have coffee with a user as a part of my requirements gathering.

Don't most white collar workers have to think? Don't people take notes, write outlines, ask questions and then consider the answers to those questions? Or is there a prejudice about computer people and goofing off? Lolly gagging, frittering away time in frivolity; are these vices peculiar to computer specialists? I think not.

It is true that, as a group, we blur the lines between work and play: we play at work and we work at home sometimes. We even work in the shower sometimes (see below). I will even grant you that until I started keeping track of my time very carefully, I tended to overestimate the amount of time that I worked at home and the amount of time that I goofed off at work.




However, it is not true that I was working less that 40 hours per week and it is not true that when I need to think, I appear to be just taking up space. Coming up to me to ask what I am doing, or to jokingly imply that I am wasting time is the exact opposite of helping.

(For me, the one exception to this etiquette is the forest of unshaven young guys staring moodily into their laptops at Starbucks. I am willing to assume that they are just wrestling with writer's block or dealing with having an empty head.)

The Safety Pause

The Safety Pause is my version of the carpenter's adage "measure twice, cut once." In my consulting practice, I find it best to consider, reconsider and then pull the trigger, be the task writing code, designing software or processing data.
 
The Safety Pause lets the rest of my brain chime in and prevents "God, I just want to be done" syndrome. I embraced the Safety Pause because I kept finding that after pulling the trigger on something, the very next instant, something would occur to me that I should have done differently, or even why I should not have pulled the trigger at all. I decided that having that revelation BEFORE I pulled the trigger would be better. So I started deliberately walking away and doing something else. The thing-into-head-popping is not as quick as when I have shot myself in the foot, but it often happens.



I also find that sleeping on a problem often means that I wake up with a solution all ready for inspection. Sometimes this solution is flawed, but it is often a good starting point. I even find that ideas come to me in the shower, which is a drag because I rarely remember to bill for showering or sleeping, and yet....



Conclusion



So the next time you see a co-worker staring off into the middle distance, just leave them alone. They may actually be thinking. And if you see a co-worker finish most of a task and go get a cup of something hot before doing the final work, remember that they may just be trying to avoid trouble down the road.