When you were hired by your current employer, you may think it's because of your winning personality, your dazzling smile, or your encyclopedic knowledge of Java. But it's not. You were hired for your ability to sit and concentrate for long periods of time to solve problems, then placed in an environment where it's utterly impossible to do that! Who decides that, despite overwhelming evidence that it's bad for productivity and people hate it, that you must sit in a cubicle? The furniture police!

This keynote describes the frustrations of modern knowledge workers in their quest to actually get some work done, and solutions for how to guard yourself against all those distractions. Neal Ford talks about environments, coding, acceleration, automation, and avoiding repetition as ways to defeat the misguided attempts to sap your ability to produce good work. Neal gives you ways to go on the lam from the furniture police and the ammunition to fight back!