Quiet Weeks

Periodically throughout the year, the Go team holds “quiet weeks”, with no important conversations happening, to give people time for focus on deep work.

We aim to do about four single weeks per year, toward the middle of each change window and the middle of each freeze. When we do this, we pre-announce the quiet week on golang-dev@ and post a pinned issue on the issue tracker during the quiet week.

Quiet weeks have two goals:

  1. Create time for people to disconnect, take a real break, and recharge, without worrying that they will need to catch up on what they missed when they return.

  2. Create time for people who keep working to do deep work, without all the usual interruptions, including online discussions.

Quiet weeks can mean vacation. If you're not on vacation, they don't mean not working. Getting work done quietly is great, and we don't want to stop that. We've used an example that if a couple people agree beforehand that the deep work they want to do next week is some kind of collaboration, like meeting to talk through a thorny design doc they are drafting, or pair programming sessions, that's totally fine, as long as that's how they both want to use the week and as long as no one else who would have wanted to be involved will feel like they missed it.

It's also definitely fine to file most issues and mail most CLs: we don't want everyone to have to queue up a whole bunch of things to send at the end of the quiet week. On the other hand, if you have an issue or a CL that you think might spark a discussion that people will regret having missed or need to catch up on when they return, then we'd appreciate it if you can hold those and wait to post them until the quiet is over.