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.

Pair programming exhausts me. When I write code alone, I usually have breaks every 20 minutes or so. I go for a short walk after 1h. I look out of the window every now and then. Sometimes I put some background music. When I’m doin pair programming I’m supposed to: think out loud, look at the screen 100% of the time, sit in front of the screen for at least 1h straight. Think at the same speed than my peer.

Not worth it for me. Don’t care if we together are more productive; I couldn’t care less. I care more about my eye sight, and sitting routine.

I can sit and program 16 hours straight without breaks.

I cannot talk to someone else for an hour without feeling exhausted and needing a long break afterwards.

Talking to someone else while programming? It's revving up my brain into the red zone. Sometimes the adrenaline boost does its job but I do pay the price.

Same. It seems the coding part of my brain and the communicating are mutually exclusive

I wonder if it’s related to the phenomena of some people having a ‘narrator’ in their head or, like me, there’s no voice and it takes effort to convert abstract thoughts to sentences

no I have the voice but I can either explain or do, not both.

Maybe this is a misconception or misrepresentation of pair-programming, at least compared to my experience. One person isn't supposed to be doing both. You're either navigating/explaining or driving/doing. Pair programming isn't about one person doing everything and another person watching and trying to keep up. It's about communicating and sharing an understanding, like a realtime/interactive PR description/review while writing. Of course there are times where one person will simply say "let me write this out and discuss after" and go at it for a short while, but it should be the exception rather than the rule in settings where it worked best for me.

This feels a bit no true scotsman.