The cost of interrupted work (2023)

Some days an interruption will throw me off my train of thought, and I spend the remaining six hours collecting discarded bottles and railway ties for hopeful use somewhere, somehow, sometime.

Other days an interruption costs me pretty much nothing.

I’m still trying to figure out how to tell which of those days I’m going to have and whether to just not log into Slack for the day.

I've found one thing that minimizes interruption cost: pair programming. At one startup we pair programmed all day, every day. Resuming from an interruption was almost seamless. Can't explain it, only experienced it.

If only I wouldn’t prefer stabbing myself in the leg with a rusty knife over pair programming.

I've never done official pair programming, but I get frustrated when I'm not on the keyboard as I find others think slower.

Have you tried plugging in a second keyboard and taking over where necessary? I do a lot of remote work in which my colleague and I work on the same computer and it's quite useful for either of us to jump in with our own keyboard (and mouse). It does take a bit of occasional verbal negotiation to agree on who really knows what to do (and can do it fastest) but if you communicate well then it's pretty easy.