AFK catch up and information processing

AFK – Away From Keyboard.

Notification overload

When working for any company, coming back after holiday, you need to catch up on what has happened during your time away.

Note to self, remove Slack highlight words during AFK! (My WordPress.com notifs didn’t sync but that was ~20 by my guess)

Information processing

Part of my role is doing a weekly roundup for all of WooCommerce.com Support of our internal p2 blogs, which this week is helping a lot since it doubles as catching up on last week’s happenings.

So earlier my Chrome looked like this (and this was only my top line p2 check list!):

(Most of those W tabs are the WooSupport p2 blog)

People often ask me how I am “everywhere”, since I seem to know a lot of what is going on. A comment someone made to me on my 1 year anniversary at Automattic

I agree with [colleague], it seems like you have always been here.
What is your secret superpower to be helping everywhere?
Congrats and thank you for your omnipresence!

…I just don’t know for sure, unless someone watched me during my work day, I’m unable to explain exactly how I digest all that information from Slack and P2s, and then regurgitate that upon request.

Disconnect

And it just happened to listen to the part of Lori’s interview with Jeff Robbins on the Yonder podcast about AFK around this related idea.

It is good to disconnect, and being in Portugal, it was really healthy, and made me rethink about how I digest information. I’m keeping my Slack notifications on my phone turned off, (I will keep the app on my device, as I use it also to beta test the app itself.) so like Lori says – if I’m at my computer, I’m working, but otherwise I’m not.

I had a habit of checking P2s and Slack when walking the dog during the day, waiting for the kettle to boil, or waiting in-line to get coffee at Henry’s. I want to reduce that habit, and check only at intervals – but that might not work, everyone has different ways of processing information, and this worked for me, so we’ll see!

Feature image photo by Mark Solarski on Unsplash.