Introducing Fast Status

19 May 2016

There is a book that every creative professional or manager of creative professionals must read: Peopleware. DeMarco and Lister make a strong case for people being more important than process or technology. In Chapter 10, Brain Time and Body Time, the authors recounted an experience with a client company where they began to measure uninterrupted work time. At some point, the engineers began to display red bandannas on their desks to indicate that now might not be a good time to interrupt their work. Fast Status is like a digital red bandanna.

Probably the second or third time I read that chapter, I was working in a very typical environment for the modern creative worker. I had a desk, one or two flimsy walls, and a tiny separator from the desk next to mine. The room was loud, or at least full of important conversations that needed to happen, but not for the work I was doing. While the noise was an issue, the convenience of my desk for coworkers who had questions for me was probably a bigger problem. I was always glad to help out coworkers, and I’ve been known to like to talk, but I also had work to do. When you combine this physical work environment with the digital work environment of today, interruptions never stop, and unlike in a software company in the 1980’s, a red bandanna will not cut it.

That was when I first started thinking about some kind of system for widely broadcasting your busy status. I’ve thought through a good number of ideas for how it could work, and I’ve probably made excited pitches to every person I know. The most common objections to the project are that it is too simple, and that people will likely abuse or ignore any busy status. Both are probably right, but also missing some key ideas.

Oversimple as an Asset

The idea of a service or system that only communicates a binary (or trinary) status seems superfluous. Practically every device and application has some way of setting a do-not-disturb status or the equivalent. Surely, we don’t need yet it if we can already set our phones, chat apps, and computers to busy. But, isn’t that exactly why we need some way of coordinating this information? If we make the most simple tool possible – not even a tool, just a common data structure to pass around – we can possibly integrate with each of these other applications and devices with ease.

And if it is as simple as I suggest, it could be used for more than just people who do not want to be disturbed. What if the office bathroom could tell you it is occupied? The microwave? A server? Any resource that can be free, busy or occupied should be able to communicate status in a simple, predictable, portable manner.

Automation and Social Convention

What about the people who set themselves as busy, and never set themselves as free? Whether by accident, or on purpose, it is bound to happen. Well, that’s on them. Like any other social convention, it depends on the people more than the technology to work. Additionally, the fact that this tool is only the data itself makes the use of the tool totally up to the user, not the toolmaker.

Additionally, this simplicity would allow for user interfaces that are transparent, or nearly so. A worker could put a box with three light-up buttons that make changing status a single motion. A sensor could be placed in a bathroom lock to detect when the door is closed, sending appropriate status out from there. Automation and integration will make this a tool that actually gets used appropriately.

I’m very excited to get work done on this project. I’ve already begun by implementing the basic data structures, and their transformation to and from both single-line text and JSON. Work on a simple microservice to update and store status is on the way next.