Silent Hour - Experiences

Week ago I blogged about our new experiment - Silent Hour.

Our team has just one room, people sitting next to each other and even if you are discussing with only one team member, others are also easily distracted. Headphones do help a little, but we decided to try something different. Between 12:00 to 13:00 we close doors of our team rooms to avoid all unnecessary disturbances both from internal and external origins.

For customer contacts we fortunately have first tier customer support which can handle easy tasks independently. Complicated tasks and problems are forwarded to developers, but during Silent Hour we encourage them to try little bit harder before doing that. Or they can take request for callback if the issue is not too urgent. But rules are not absolute; if they really needed help they can ask advice from developers anytime. Common sense rules.

On the other hand managers and salespeople tend to rush to ask questions from developers at any time. And just fiver minutes later they come back to ask follow-up question. Face to face communication is good thing -no doubt about that- but just when you are getting back to flow for programming, there is already new distraction waiting... With Silent Hour closed-door-policy should encourage people to at least think do they need the answer right away or could they wait 30 minutes.

This have been working quite well. After little over week of experiment I did questionnaire to all stakeholders including developers, customer support, managers and salespeople. Almost all answered. Results were quite encouraging. Nobody thought that Silent Hour-policy had made his own work more difficult. Even that sometimes people did not remember the policy and have to turn away when they noticed closed door, they did not feel that additional waiting time for their communication needs did do any harm.  Everybody understood the need for developers to have some time when they can just concentrate task at the hand. And naturally developers were quite thrilled for the uninterrupted time. Sometimes we got visitors even during silent period, but always with good reason. 

Conclusion was that we end this as experiment and make it as permanent policy.