The interruptible programmer

You see, the human mind can only hold so many concepts in active thought at the same time. It's somewhere around 7. If paying attention to your surroundings is 1, there's only 6 left. If someone -happens- in the surroundings, there's at least 1 more gone. If something -interesting- happens, there 2 or 3 more as you go off on tangents thinking about them.

Yeah, half your mind is taken with your surroundings at times.

My solution is to pay attention to my surroundings when working on easy projects, and for projects that -really- need my attention, I put in earphones and block everything out. I have a few different music sets that I've heard so many times and/or they have a sound that doesn't ask my brain to process them.

With my earphones in, people have to yell (or call my phone or IM) to get my attention. I don't check even check my email.

I usually don't have to resort to the earphones. One line of thinking is that if it takes all your ability to write the code, you couldn't possibly fix bugs in it. You should be writing well below your ability so that you can fix it when it breaks. This usually means the code is easier to read as well. But some things are just innately complex, and there's nothing you can do about it.

If you are unlucky enough to be interrupted while in that kind of state, the spinning plates effectively fall and break - it can almost be painful, and certainly drudging to get back up to where you were before. I've found this tends to take anywhere from 30 minutes to a day of time away from me because getting back in that flow state can be so damn difficult.

I think a lot of the problem comes down to us using the brain for stuff it's not great at.

Much of the problem with interruptions is that of losing context. When you’re in that Zone, you’re juggling a whole bunch of context in your head, adjusting it on the fly, and maintaining and tweaking connections between issues constantly.

I find that there's an all-too common hair-shirted developer mentality that glories in the stunt of keeping track of umpteen different entities and variables at once. Mental/conceptual organization is an area where work smarter should definitely trump work harder. I think a part of the problem has to do with the tendency for dramatic fire-fighting to be rewarded in organizations. What results is like an emergency responder TV show. It's exciting to watch the responders rappelling or doing something exciting and unusual every week, but in reality a well run city would strive to make such events as rare as possible and be boring as possible.

Think of it this way, if you ran a trucking company, would you want employees who had a different hair-raising tale to tell on just about every trip? Do you know developers who are full of such tales?

Then one day I thought about the 66 minutes I 'waste' each day on the train to university; 33 minutes per trip. I started to take out my laptop as soon as I get on the train and try to work on programming. Initially I had very little done, by the time I really start programming it was time to get off.

But now, 3 or 4 months into it, I seem to manage to get something done every time; I'd say now the 33 minutes is worth at least 20 minutes of productivity if I had been spending it in a 4 hour block.

You have to figure in some time each day away from the screen but still thinking about work in a kind-of background task. And carry a notepad or make voice memos when the light bulb moment strikes.

I have a terrible memory and this is what I have learned to do. Long coding sessions? No; I design, then plan out a short amount of coding at a time. Especially if I'm modifying unfamiliar code, I'll make notes about what functions I need to change and what changes need to be done and in what order, and the possible side effects that may result so I can test for them. Leaving for the day, I'll just write down what I was last doing and what's next on a post it note and that removes the excuse of staying at work "just a few more minutes until I finish up this method."

In the end I find it's far more productive than sitting down for hours coding away. And a nice side effect is that it really doesn't matter if I'm interrupted because where I am and what I was doing is already documented.

Doing this forces me to think at a higher level about overall data & control flow instead of being down in the weeds all the time where it's hard to see the big picture.

Surprisingly, the first part (just starting) is harder than following through.

Extraverts of course face the opposite problem. How do you remain focused on the outer world world while not becoming completely dependent on your coworkers?

There's no suggestion that you're going to change your environment in unrealistic ways, it's more about dealing with the fact you don't work in a perfect space.

Ingenuity and Ticket Systems don't combine very well.

There's no list of action items for Truly Cool Stuff. You just dive in and start messing around. You can probably externalize some context as you cross off ideas and concepts that won't work. But there's no game plan, thus no concept of a "Next Action". You're on a blank sheet of paper with a head full of context, and any distraction will kill that.

So yeah, there are circumstances where you can survive interruptions. But there are also circumstances where they'll kill you.

But taking a couple weeks off from a project really sets me back. It could take can entire day to get back up to speed.

What ticketing system does he use that he can "get in and out of in 30 sec" ... so that he can toss every new idea into it without breaking his flow?

How, specifically, does he track his context? In particular, how does he track context across multiple projects while still being able to react to interruptions in a timely way?

How does he track his one-and-only-one next action for each project in a way that's simple/easy/fast enough that he doesn't give it up in disgust?