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Comment by atis | Hacker News Reader

That sounds a bit strange because there's always something else you could be doing while waiting for that answer? Either working on another issue, or trying to improve something without being asked to, or even just learning something that could (or not) be helpful sometime in the future. Worst case scenario: read some HN :-)

But really: doesn't working remotely mean that, when blocked, you can just leave the computer and do some life stuff, then come back a few hours later and continue from there?

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Sure, I can always do something else instead, but that context switching is costly for me as well, when a minute-long conversation, though briefly distracting for a colleague, would have been able to keep me working at the task at hand.

How is context switching costly for you, but only briefly distracting for your colleague?

To me it's the difference between a few line exchange that is briefly distracting vs switching to working on a completely different task, getting up to speed on it just in time to have to switch back and refamiliarize myself with where I left off. Order of minutes vs hours.

In my experience the questions tend to cluster towards a small group of individuals; so from their perspective, you're the 5th interruption in line for the day and they've barely been able to start their own work.

That's one reason why I like the idea of taking forced breaks; they give you a scheduled time to handle brief interruptions, and if you're fairly regular people can tune in to your schedule(e.g. if you're always "working" the first 50 mins of an hour and "resting" the last 10 mins, it's easy to know whether you'd be able to quickly answer a question). Of course, the forced breaks are another form of an interruption from flow; it's still a trade-off.

Sorry for the late reply, but "briefly distracting" tells me it's clear you don't understand "the zone".

>>But really: doesn't working remotely mean that, when blocked, you can just leave the computer and do some life stuff, then come back a few hours later and continue from there?

Technically yes. In practice though, this only blurs the boundaries between work and leisure, as you find yourself working in evenings and weekends to make up for those down-times during the week when your team members were unreachable.

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