I don’t know – Let’s find out

When a colleague or a friend comes to you with a problem, most of the time it’s because they are so deep in the rabbit hole, they last track of alternate paths that are available for tackling the problem. So let them explain problem and often they figure out the solution by themself.

Even if you don’t know the answer, listing to the problem and asking couple questions will uncover a solution or a new search path. Recently, one of my colleague was telling me about problem with terraform scripts, I asked couple of dumb question as I don’t know anything about terraform. These questions provided a new attack angle and a solution was found in no time.

These little problem solving interactions are learning opportunities for the both the parties. If the problem is related to a piece of code you wrote or worked with previously, then you may be able to see a way to improve the code or add better comments to that section. If your colleague is working on something new, then it’s an opportunity for you to learn about it.

Have a Signal

If you are worried about people distributing you in your deep work then have a signal to indicate that you are doing deep work, such as snoozing notifications in slack or putting hoodie on. This will help your colleagues to know you are doing deep work and wouldn’t like to be disturbed.

Lets not just say Hi

If you are requesting help from one over instant messaging channels, then just don’t send hi/hey message. Send your full query along with Hi. Not everyone will be monitoring the messaging apps and have their notifications turned on. if you just send “Hi”, you will only get back another “Hi” after sometime. So include your full request if you asking for help, I know it’s doesn’t come naturally, it requires a bit of conscious effort (I am practicing this from couple years, still I sometimes forget and just sent “Hi”).