Context switching costs more than we give it credit for
thinkingthrough.substack.com
thinkingthrough.substack.com
This point in the article lost me pretty quickly. My flow state is drastically improved by music, and I have never ever named a variable after the song name or song artist I'm listening to in my life.
Edit: Nor have I ever seen a variable named after a song name or artist.
Edit2: NotoriousViewController. TheWeekndTimer. RedHotChiliPointers. Now I want to name my variables like this.
I suspect there is a personality difference in play where some people find themselves trying to analyse the music, so it acts as a distraction for them. Compared to them, I sink into the energy/rhythm of the music and it helps drown out other distracting noises.
It might also depend on one's playlist. Some people like having a TV on for background noise, but I would find that highly distracting. My playlist leans towards highly energetic music where there isn't much reliance on lyrics, such as technical death metal.
Its just damn pleasurable to do!
(Also happy hardcore makes a passable coffee substitute/addition.)
This is similar for me. The worst are live recording with applause and interactions with the audience from a show. While I can fade out lyrics it's close to impossible to ignore these.
I personally feel like there are different components of my brain and some of them just want to do something, and if I don't "distract" them then they do something arbitrary and maybe in turn distract me... but if I need them, and they are busy deciding some music I am listening to, I lose out on the maybe-even-often subconscious processing they do that gives me valuable insight. I thereby find some (mostly useless) tasks easier if I am seriously even playing a video game with a targeted skill while doing them (people hate me in meetings sometimes ;P), or maybe listening to music, but if I am doing the hard coding work I "should be doing" I just can't :(.
The results[2] are published in an article behind a paywall, but they give details of the two tasks presented to the subjects, neither of which involved actually writing code. One was a 15-minute task of locating syntax errors, another was a 20-minute task of locating logic errors.
[1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/music-distraction/2005-lesiuk.pdf [2]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08874417.2000.11...
[ETA]
According to [1] it's described in "Peopleware"[2]. Apparently needs corroboration (see sibling reply by 'civilized)
[1] https://www.quora.com/Does-listening-to-music-while-programm...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...
If I've just started both are probably going to be good results. If I'm 4 hours in the music one will probably do better because I've not wandered away from my desk distracted by a shiny pen.
On the other hand, there are several other factors, like how tired I am, how hard the foreground task is etc., so it is hard to pin-point it specifically to the lyrics language.
If I need a mood boost or something to get my body "moving" in my seat and keep me from mentally wandering, I'll throw on stuff I really know and love. Usually I'm doing menial tasks or simple coding.
If I'm having a hard time focusing and need a distraction for some parts of my brain but not all of it, I have a "deathcore" (really more like melodic (tech) death metal) playlist where most of the songs sound very similar and you can't understand a thing the vox are saying.
Typically if I'm super tired AND need to block out the outside world but even hard to understand screaming won't cut it, I have to resort to either instrumental metal or LoFi hip hop beats to study to.
If I'm currently listening to music, I really only do a full stop/pause to focus if I notice I've run a breakpoint three times and have no idea what I've been stepping thru, or if I'm trying to refactor or write a fresh, new logic flow and just can't get my brain focused enough to "check it" for all possible paths. That's when I cut the feed, double-time my focus, and once I'm convinced it's "safe" I can hit play again.
Brains are weird and finicky I tell ya.
The effect of music depends on the person, the type of music (lyrics or instrumental - even if there is applause or not), how well the person knows the music and, of course, the task itself and its complexity.
Until there's a way to test all of those permutations, I think the best we are going to do is rely on all our anecdotal evidence, as it affects ourselves.
Thinking about it, though, I find myself reaching for music when it feels like my mind wants to wander and not focus on my job. Once the music is on, my mind has an immediate outlet for wandering - it jumps to the music while I'm still looking at the code. So while maybe music and programming do compete for resources, music maybe acts as a sort of safety net that makes it less likely for me to derail completely.
Or maybe some just dellude themselves (and e.g. lose congnitive capacity with music, but conflate their hapiness boost for increased productivity, etc.).
This "differently structured brains" was the once popular idea behind different "learning styles" (visual learner, etc.) who has been discredited since.
Evolutionary it's more probable we have quite identically structured brains when it comes to main functions, and just have different e.g. cultural tastes on top.
It was about the repeatability of counting to a minute, and he experimented on the difference between seeing a timer tick in your minds eye and hearing a count increment in your head.
He had been experimenting with what he could do while counting, and found he couldn't count while talking, but could count while reading. John Tukey didn't believe him, and thought it should be the other way around. It turned out Tukey and Feynman counted completely differently, Tukey by visualising and Feynman using internal speech, and so Tukey could count while talking, but not while reading. So, not the same person doing both methods.
Another example of this broader phenomenon is galvanic skin response. People ran with the lie detector BS and then the whole field basically died for a few decades, only to eventually be rebranded "electrodermal activity". Probably your smart watch will be collecting EDA in a few years.
1) You don't think people have different learning styles? 2) You don't think that I know what distracts me while I'm working? 3) You don't think that evolution produces _vast_ diversity, and that people have vast differences in brain structure?
Strangely enough I find working in the "white noise" of a coffee shop lets me hit flow state even better than silence. Not sure if thats more due to the "i'm in this place to do the thing" effect or the actual noise though.
Music on the other hand, I cannot program while listening to. Brains are different.
Say depth and duration.
Depth is kind of like how many digits of a number you can memorize.
Duration is a little like endurance in a race, but a little like tying yourself to the mast too [1].
I get much deeper into the zone without music, and I also stay in it longer.
Might not be as fun, but for me, I know this without a shadow of a doubt.
[1] ironically, odysseus tied himself to the mast to listen to music.
I generally listen to lofi music while coding. Increases my focus for some reason.
Music with lyrics is impossible to code to though.
I think this is something CEOs don't realize when they push for ,,open offices''.
For me a group of 5 people in a room was the optimal number of people for coding enjoyment: just enough people that I feel the pressure and don't feel alone, but not too much noise, so I can work well. For people who can work with music an open office is still kind of OK, even if they don't like it that much.
My solution was to listen to one of various white noise videos on YouTube, my favorites were storms and rain.
I agree that about 5 people in a room is a perfect fit. Team sized. Open spaces were too distracting.
Edit: I think this might be it: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191115-office-noise-a...
edit: also if you make a playlist made of a chronological listing of one artists full albums.
I've read somewhere that humans language processing centra only can deal with one input source at the time. So reading and talking is more or less impossible to do at the same time.
I cannot stand the "out loud" variety of music when I'm working, at least.
If you're thinking, writing, or planing(or anything with 'words' in your head or 'talk' to yourself), music with lyric is bad (though I found the effect more soften a bit if you listen to what you don't understand, e.g. foreign language music, still, zero lyric is crucial for thinking)
If your activity is not about words, but more 'action' (e.g painting , making art, gardening) then you can blast your ear with lyrics or the whole audiobooks all you want. It works great.
Music helping with your flow status might be related to it blocking external noise. I have similar results with (some type of) music, earplugs or white noise.
People when multitasking usually believe they are being hyper efficient but when observed from the outside they are less so than when single-tasking sequentially.
I've taken to lying horizontal with a keyboard on my lap and a projector aimed at the ceiling. Feels ridiculous but it's at least comfortable.
Sometimes I don't think I'd mind being a brain in a vat.
I occasionally have RSI issues, which are usually a stress symptom telling me I'm operating above red-line. If I listen to my body, things work out much better than if I try to ignore it.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
I sometimes listen to music while coding, but for me it only really works with something like Aphex Twin or Autechre. Something that puts me in a meditative state - almost like white noise. And usually the purpose is to help block out surrounding noise. I’m with Persig on this one — when it comes to deep concentration, I tend to prefer quiet.
Yea, this is highly dependent on the person. I have difficulty in life operating _without_ music. In anything, really. My brain wanders, i start making music, etc.
Worse yet, i find silence while programming to be stress inducing. My shoulders get super tight, and i'll find myself in a trance an hour later, super tense and feeling like i'm waiting for a bomb to drop.
Music is my emotional regulator. It lets me mirror where my head is. Chill, aggressive, grinding, etc.
The only time i find music to be a distraction rather than a method of focus is if the song is too new to me, is heavily lyrics based, _and_ i really enjoy that authors lyrics. I tend to want to focus on the lyrics, learn them, understand them, etc. Most of the time though lyrics are just yet another sound, and they vanish into the fog of work for me. I often even lightly sing while i'm programming (I work from home, lol).
edit: Oh, i should add though - this whole post of mine represents the .. maybe 80% use case. I do turn music down when i'm thinking about a challenging problem. Something i need to hyper focus on. But that's only 10-20% of the time for me. Most of the time i have a clear picture about what the general design is, and now i just need to write out the internals.
This is why I listen to techno, retrowave, instrumental jazz and classical music when I code. I leave hard rock, metal and pop music to when I'm not coding.
Slowest part about marking these is having to context switch for each question. So I'd mark Q1 , then Q2 etc for one assignment, then go over to the next one and start back at Q1.
I figured this was super inefficient since I needed to have the answer and context of the question in my mind and keep switching.
So I wrote a program to parse all of the questions from all of the reports and present them to me in question batches. So now I see all of Q1 one after the other for each student's and mark those. Then once all of the Q1's are done, I mark all the Q2's. After all the marking is done, I run that through another program that then formats that data to each student so it's back onto their individual report plus any comments or deductions.
I find that apart from saving the time to have to open tonnes of docx files, now it takes maybe 5 mins to mark everything.
Or seem not so good, if sorted after the best student.
So maybe the answer order should be random.
Students upload PDFs, and mark appropriate pages for each assigned question. The graders can then decide to either mark every question in a single sheet, or a single question in every sheet. I find the latter more comfortable. The key element here is that the burden of assigning pages to questions shifts from the grader to the student, which is a significantly better use of cognitive resources because it comes at little marginal cost to the student but tremendous cost for the grader.
In the kitchen, from long practice, I do not have to think about prep, technique, or washing up. There are no decisions I need to make for those tasks. They take very little attention. This frees me to spend my focus on the more abstract goals of what I want to cook, and for me it is not a context switch to wash a bowl while an onion is sauteeing. I can certainly cook while keeping the kitchen clean more efficiently than I could cook and then clean it. But when I was first cooking, it was a context switch to go from chopping an onion to chopping a carrot. Both tasks required my attention and focus.
Upon reading the title I was anticipating an article that would provide a great deal of catharsis, only to find "programming whilst listening to music" and "cleaning dishes whilst cooking"...
I'm currently wearing a number of hats in a software implementation project (project management, change management, data management, training, communications) and having to switch between is like coordinating to put down a heavy piece of furniture being carried by six people and then assigning those same six people to help pick up another piece of heavy furniture.
Or, more succinctly:
Flywheel 1 must be stopped before flywheel 2 can be started.
I should write my own article.
But in your own kitchen? While my toast is toasting, you know I'm going to get a head start on the dishes, or chop those garnishes, or check in on a second dish, etc. If I cooked by focusing solely on each task until it's done, I'd probably use 50-100% more time to do the same job maybe 10% better.
Recipes that claim “5 minutes of prep” are more like 20 minutes for me. It can be very discouraging.
What you describe is definitely something that comes with experience. Like using vim effectively. I’m improving but it literally took a once in a century global pandemic to overcome the initial learning curve.
Context switching makes sense when the cost of the switch is less than the time saved by doing the switch. For a beginner cook or someone whose knife skills aren't that great, maybe the cost of the switch is very high or the benefit is relatively low. Or maybe the window of idle time is not sufficient to accomplish the critical work. In this case, you just have to move the critical work earlier into the process and accept some down time.
That being said, one thing I have found is that if I'm really FOCUSING on cooking, sometimes the idle moments are larger and the context switching costs are less than I had though, and maybe I can mix some prep in with cooking. The problem comes in when you're constantly checking your phone or chatting or whatever in between the cooking steps. That can really slow you down.
With a few basic skills you can whip up so many tasty dishes.
My little secret: a homemade white sauce seafood pasta. It's embarrassingly easy to make, and wows my guests every-time.
Edit: realize my comment sounds negative about that chopper. while I don't use it anymore, it's cheap enough and worth trying if you are on the fence or don't enjoy the prepwork.
There's a huge difference between having to consciously cut vegetables, and being able to do it via muscle memory.
That said, for chopping it really helps to have a sharp knife. A dull knife takes longer to do the job and it's also more likely to cause an accident.
This is true, but sharp knives also require good handling skills. If someone has been using dull knives their whole life they will almost certainly cut themselves if given a sharp knife, unless they are also re-trained on how to use them.
Watch an episode of "Worst cooks in America" and count how many hands Ann has drawn on with a red Sharpie.
these should be done in advance if not the day before.
Basically everyone just stopped talking to them and chose the more convenient solution.
There was a nice article talking about how long it actually takes to caramelize onions. Everything says like 20 minutes when it actually takes almost an hour.
Cookbooks and recipes with rigor are few and far between.
The intent of the recipe is almost always to cook the onions for the time stated. Chefs were referring to softened, browned onions as "caramelized" for decades before the chemists started coming in and saying "well, actually that isn't technically caramelized..."
However, I also noticed in Montreal "caramelized onions" actually always meant caramelized onions.
So it's just really just poor terminology rather than a ploy to fool you.
Nobody in America is going to wait an hour for food outside of the high-end restaurants. So, anything with "caramelized onions" would need to prep and store that step with the associated degradation.
The exception was my favorite cheesesteak place (sadly now gone--the owners got old and retired). The owner literally had a row of chopped onions that stretched the length of the grill. As he cooked he would keep adding onions on the far right while moving the entire line of onions leftward--so the onions that got used actually had enough time to truly caramelize. Similarly for the steak, just much faster. When everything got to the far left (steak with cheese (people who want CheeseWhiz could go somewhere else thanks), onions, bun) his wife would assemble the full thing.
It was a thing of beauty to watch them work. And the cheesesteak was glorious.
And now I'm hungry and craving a cheesesteak that doesn't exist anymore. :(
Except that this is wrong. It makes a world of difference in how the recipe tastes. And you have to be a relatively experienced cook to know to flag this.
"Cooked" onions are generally soft but still acrid.
"Caramelized" onions are starting to get hard again because of browning and are sweet with no acrid flavor at all.
Those are two VERY different flavor profiles.
And that's before we get to the point that we have to wait 40 extra minutes for the caramelized onions while everything else is waiting because you expected that it only took 20.
I gather you think very poorly of chefs and recipe writers, but, really, no recipe-writer tests a recipe by cooking the onions for an hour and then writes "20 minutes" to try and win some speed sweepstakes.
If the space is designed well with close attention to workflows and storage and even a gram of attention paid to the UI/UX of the kitchen, work would a LOT faster.
Now, eh, no problem.
Go watch some online videos about knife skills. Just knowing how to properly hold a knife çan cut prep time down.
1. A sharp knife. This is a must for just about anything in the kitchen. While the price tag of a name brand German or Japanese knife might scare you off, a $5 Kiwi #171 knife from Amazon or eBay can serve you well, and will kick the pants of the knives found in a lot of home kitchens.
2. Don't cut the root off until the very end. If this were a decade ago, I'd write more about technique, but the reality is you're better served by watching a few someones do it on youtube than reading what I type.
3. Practice.
The edge of a knife is very fragile, because it is very very thin. As such, when you use the knife's edge, it will eventually "bend over".
A honing edge straightens the edge again. That's not "sharpening", its just pushing a stick against the knife edge to realign everything. It will cut better once you hone it.
https://www.globeequipment.com/learning-center/wp-content/up...
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"Sharpening" is when you remove metal from the edge of the knife.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0001/8425/4516/files/messe...
Honing should be done every time you use the knife. Sharpening should only be done every month (if you use the knife a lot) or once every year (if its a rarely used knife)
Special mention for the peculiarity that Kyocera makes amazing ceramic knives, and on the subject that Peugeot makes amazing salt and pepper grinders.
Mise en place[1] is implicit in recipes, but as you say it does make the listed timings misleading.
Actually, you can be four! Send me your address and i’ll send it to you, email the gmail domain with the handle plusjade
it’s really that good ^_^
Of course, learning to cook also involves many other techniques and combining flavors in more complex ways, but if you're starting out and can't boil an egg, it's a great introduction to the basics of what makes food taste good.
Similarly good (and maybe a good companion) is J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s YouTube channel. He basically wears a GoPro and cooks full meals with a very minimum number of cuts. You can see him make mistakes and adapt recipes to what he has on hand in real time. Watching a pro do that really made a lot of things click for me. His book (The Food Lab) and his articles on Serious Eats are also good, but his videos have really been extraordinary.
Samin Nosrat is a fantastic teacher. She shares cooking through the lens of “why”. It’s the opposite of say, rote learning which, as a beginner, i’d always assumed “follow this recipe” was and so suffered indifference toward the world of cooking. I’ve never been good at following directions.
She’s the teacher that guides you to what you could not see because of false assumptions.
Cooking is now an endless exploration. There are foundational answers to “why” and though I’d call it an anti-recipe book, the second half is all recipes heh, but they are like seed ideas. You can practice one seed and explore yourself how to build upon it.
I made an herb salsa: citrus juice, herbs (i use cilantro), onion, salt, and oil. This is the ACID. You can then incorporate the other 3 however you wish. It makes me feel like a chef! I put it in eggs. and chicken. i’m still exploring. It takes time and care, but not “to get the right answer”, rather to develop your point of view. I look forward to it now. each meal is an opportunity to practice and explore. its my own creativity and art. i love it.
Invest in good cookware.
Three high quality pots and two high quality pans will improve your cooking experience, learning, and results exponentially.
This is actually a problem with most current "food TV". None of them seem to actually want to teach people how to cook. They'll spend 90 seconds showing the host throw together a dish while glossing over most of the details and techniques, when they should be spending the full 30 minutes.
1) knife basics & skills. Not to nerd out too much here, but a good chefs knife is such an important tool (reply if you want any specific tips or have questions)
2) learn how to cut or prep the thing you are going to do on YouTube. Watch a couple of videos. Blue apron has good ones, but YouTube will also often jump to the good stuff if you are willing to use Google's search.
Most useful: basic knife skills should help you cut cucumbers and zucchini better. After that, broccoli can be really efficiently removed from the stem. Lemons can be fairly easily quartered and de seeded if quartered vertically. Literally anything else and whatever cut, just watch some videos. Onions - there are nice ways to dice them. Etc etc
3) be kind to yourself; prep the kitchen a bit ahead of time. Clean surfaces. Pre measure ingredients into bowls. Keep a trash bowl near your cutting board so you don't have to walk to the garbage bin. Start the timer after you've done a little work to get things ready, but before you've turned on any heat or sliced any vegetables (eventually, the prep step will be super fast or you can optimize your kitchen for your flows)
Do all your measuring of ingredients at once. Once all of the ingredients are measured, then combining them when needed becomes far more efficient, instead of context-switching.
Alternatively, use a scale. Keep your dish you're baking on the scale, and just keep adding stuff until the right amount of weight is added. IMO, the scale methodology is far easier.
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As far as "chopping an onion", there's a safe way to slice food. You want the knife to be very sharp, then when you do a slight "slicing" motion, you can feel the bite. When you feel the bite, that's when you can press down, knowing that the knife won't slip on the onion and slice off a chunk of your skin.
If you push down before you feel the bite, you may have the top of the knife slide off the top off the onion and onto your fingers. With a dull knife, that's not a big deal (but a dull knife means you're not really going to be cutting very quickly...)
A knife is not a saw. One should try to cut down and forward, away from you. And you should slightly protrude your knuckles out so that your knife is away from your fingers as it is against your knuckles.
I would recommend a (curved) chef's knife for most people, though.
IMO: If you're going that small, get a food processor.
Food processors are very useful in a number of recipes: homemade cuts of ground beef (ever try Rib-eye burgers?), breadcrumbs, casserole?
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Similarly, if you're julienne (aka: french cut) a lot, consider a mandoline slicer. A knife can be used, but dedicated tools are faster and more efficient.
The knife is the general purpose cutter. But there are many other cutting tools that are better at making certain shapes.
Take mise en place seriously. If the recipe calls for chopped onions, chop them before you turn on the burner. Later you can work on parallelizing the process (eg, chopping the onions while the bacon is rendering) but to start with, just work on getting all the pieces on the table before you start the chess clock. Delegate to sous-spouses or sous-children.
Rarely do you need to be a perfectionist. If you are sautéing or stewing or braising or souping, the onions cook down. Ceviche is a different matter. Baking may be more specific, but that kind of witchcraft is forbidden around here.
> If the recipe calls for chopped onions, chop them before you turn on the burner. Later you can work on parallelizing the process
For most meals I start the slowing-cooking item first and then start on the others once it is in the over / pot or similar. E.g. a roast joint. I'll get it in the oven and then prep the roasting veggies (e.g. potatoes and parsnips), get them in the oven and then start peeling the green veg (which only need cooking for a few minutes). Over the years I've learned how long things need and how long I take to prep them, so my timings usually work out.
Chinese cooking (or at least my take on it) is my main exception: given the short cooking times of some things, and the large number of ingredients / dishes, I tend to prep everything first, and then start cooling simultaneously.
The other obvious exception is using my smoker, where a meal might stay in it for more than 5 hours. I say 'meal' rather than 'meat' because I also use the smoker to cook chilli and tagine.
Overcooking meats to be on the safe side, and overcooking the veggies, because they are in with the meat for the same amount of time, but they should be in for less, etc..
I guess I'm missing out on taste and nutrients aswell due to this?
While I was unemployed for 9 months I got a brilliant idea to learn cooking outside of sandwiches and very basic meals. One of the main dishes I'd wanted to learn was boiled rice which everyone around me always fail to do properly except SEA expats. I was surprised that for each shape and size of rice I could buy there are 2 or 3 different sources and/or cultivars which behave differently but people tend to cook them the same way.
offtopic: where you got Space Rangers from?
Totally unrelated, but I have a dvorak keyboard layout, and navigation using HJKL is one of the things I hate most about vi. Sure, I could rebind it locally, but that doesn't help me when I use a remote machine. Perhaps this is what being left handed feels like.
You’re probably not as slow as you think.
Don't feel bad, most people are not actually good at cooking. But if you care, being good is pretty simple. It just takes actual training, which most people are surprisingly resistant to.
How long does it take you to chop an onion? Well, let me put it this way—an instructional video of someone demonstrating how to chop an onion, moving slowly and pausing to explain the technique, will run about 90 seconds, possibly less. If it takes you more than about a minute to cut an onion, you are slow.
Most people have dull knives, hold the knife incorrectly so it is unstable, make the wrong cuts in the onion so it falls apart, hold the onion incorrectly and move slowly because they are worried about cutting their fingers. If you sharpen your knife, hold it correctly, make the correct cuts, and hold the onion correctly, you’ll find that it’s very fast to cut an onion.
Fact is—the difference between someone who is skilled and someone who is unskilled is big enough that they teach entire classes on knife technique. This is not about some esoteric subject like teaching you how to butcher small game in your kitchen—in a knife skills class, they’ll teach you basic stuff like how to cut onions. And I’ll say that being good at cutting onions does require a decent amount of skill—onions are round and slippery, after all.
Of course, this is usually true for publications which have an editorial processes (eg - Cook's Illustrated), and not more casual blogs/YT videos
It isn’t really a shady practice, but for whatever reason over several years I had never known it.
* Cut both of the heads off.
* Peeling. I don't try to remove the dry peel, instead I just remove the whole outmost layer, comes off with a shallow cut then removing it. Yeah it's a bit of a waste, but often that first layer isn't in a great shape and you'd toss it anyway.
* Cut in half, place the halfs flat side down. Much easier to do the rest when it doesn't try to roll away from under you.
* Cut to slices without breaking the pack (i.e. keep it half-onion shaped). This is probably easier to do with a small knife than a large one.
* Cut the sliced packs orthogonally to previous cuts. Done, except if you want a tiny mush (in that case, use a bigger rounded edge knife, cut with a rolling movement so that the tip end of the blade keeps in contact with the board; same technique also works great for garlic).
As others have pointed out, you'll want a sharp knife (a knife sharpener is a good investment). Cut with sideways motion with a hint of downward pressure, instead of just trying to press down through the onion.
Edit: Forgot the first step.
Treat recipe prep times the same way you'd treat a managers estimate how long it should take you fix a bug. Truth is most recipe book writers haven't actually done the prep work from zero from their recipes and are basically just guessing.
It's the same with the these TV shows where they cook a meal in 20 minutes. If you walk into a kitchen where an assistant has line up all the ingredients pre measured and prepped in separate bowels, pre-heated two ovens and all the pans they know you'll need, and made sure there are two large pots of boiling water already on the stoves then prehaps you can make the meal in 20 minutes on your 3rd or 4th try. Otherwise there is no chance.
Tangent: In the UK, I boil any water I need in a 240 V kettle. It dramatically reduces the waiting time.
Maybe that explains why the Americans are so attached to their boiling pots?
If you take a 230 V kettle and connect it to 110 V, then yes it will be less powerful. Perhaps about 1/4 of the power.
With power (watts) being volts * amps that gives the power of 3120 Vs 1320 watts for UK Vs USA respectively.
This means a UK kettle can dump heat into the water up to 2.4 times faster so should boil in less than half the time.
Kettles are at the high end of power consumption as generally people want a fast boil. Lights are towards the low end as its rare for someone to want even 1000 watts of incandescent brightness.
Sure, you could use powerful kettles in the US on a 20W outlet, or on a 230V circuit, but nobody is going to do that. A typical kettle that you can just buy and plug in wherever is less powerful in the US just because you use halve the voltage but don't wire for double the current.
It didn't occur to me that Americans would settle for having less power than the rest of the world, it seems uncharacteristic somehow :)
Always make me think of my Grans council house in Birmingham (UK) and her kettle.
Speaking of which, I don't understand why we've settled on a gas stove design that's so terribly inefficient, with most[0] of the heat leaking around the pan. Why no design with a combustion chamber of some sorts?
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[0] - Well, at least a lot. I didn't do the math here yet, but it's hard to imagine otherwise with unrestricted airflow around the pan.
Be that as it may, it's most likely more expensive. This is purely my personal guesstimate, but gas tends to be much cheaper in Poland than electricity. More efficient, maybe, but I'd be very surprised if it was cheaper given the prices.
On a related note, I was surprised when I did calculations on how much it actually costs us to bake our own bread. We started doing that a lot during this pandemic. It turns out, the cost of ingredients + electricity adds to slightly less than what it would cost to buy the same products from a bakery. This doesn't price in time spent on preparing and baking, but it's not like we could actually use that time to make money, we're having fun, and going to a store also takes time (and/or fuel). Electricity is cheap.
Thermal capacity. Gas stoves are great because they have none, so any temperature changes are immediate. Anything between the pot and the flame will destroy that advantage.
Also, the combustion chamber will have a vent for the exhaust. So I would suspect that it won't be any more efficient, except for very small pot sizes.
The airflow needs to be there, but I imagine it could be slowed down, so that the hot air spends more time transferring energy to the pot. That would retain the fast reaction time, and let one burn less gas for the same amount of cooking output.
When I got my first, I've been curious and experimented with water. Depending on the model they have sensor buttons where you can raise/lower the temperature in 10 to 20°C steps.
Mine have 10°C steps, where with water in a pot at 90°C the first few small bubbles start to rise, like in soda/mineral water. When at 100°C the big boiling bubbles start after about 2 to 3 seconds.
Mine are rated at 2500 Watts each, have segmented induction coils where the outer segments switch off with smaller pots, are plan like a mirror and thus very easy and fast to clean.
I'm such a fan! :-)
It's worth understanding though - at least in the UK the received wisdom is that "kettle is fastest" - but that's not always true any more.
I can understand why cooking can be slow and painful for people new to the activity. However, if you want to get fast at cooking, it is not that hard to get fast. Knife skills, multitasking, and planning will make everything go much faster. If your knife skills are not great (say, takes you longer than about a minute to dice an onion) or you are tired from a long day of work and aren’t in the mood to move fast, prep will take a lot longer.
Just observing people do prep I think it’s fairly plain to see that tons of people are just damn slow at it, either because they don’t enjoy going fast or because their skills aren’t up to par. And there are plenty of cooking shows where the contestants are under strict time limits but must still do all their prep within the time limit. Cutthroat Kitchen usually has a 30 minute limit, including prep, and including acts of sabotage that increase the difficulty.
I don't see, why cooking should be a competition for speed in the first place.
I like to cook, but I don't have tons of time to cook as a hobby. New recipes are worked into our regular meal times. If it takes me an hour longer than the estimated time to prep and cook, I've made everyone wait an extra hour, throwing off any other plans for the evening. That can be discouraging and lead to wondering "why did they say it only takes 20 minutes? Are they just guessing, or am I just a slow cook?" Hence this thread. :)
Cooking for the moment aside, consider lunch. I'm German (sadly, the country became closer to the US in this respect). But if you ever worked in France or Switzerland for example (not to talk about countries even further into the South), you will spot much a difference here - yet in time spent, but also in the opinion what is important at all. Cooking is the same - it is not all "hungry family" (I certainly agree, at times it is), these are more often than not rationalizations. When I am cooking, the kitchen full of people is the most satisfying situation. It doesn't matter really, how long it lasts. This is not lost time, on the contrary! Also not in the context of work, because it eventually produces energy (I don't mean the calories) also for this.
A final small example: I have an Italian espresso machine here in my offices kitchen. Producing an espresso or cappuccino requires to do all steps manually: grinding beans, evaluating the pressure on the analog gauge, provisioning the milk, making foam from it, etc. - time-consuming! But it is a micro ritual, making my head free enough for handling some of the kinds of small problems, appearing during work. I could also buy something 'modern' using pads, maybe some sort of remote control, even a robot serving the final result to me (are there such things?). I certainly will never do this.
My wife and I both do a lot of cooking and it is a fun, shared activity where we can move fast or slow, and talk about things. We also spent some time learning—learning knife skills, learning new techniques for cooking, trying new cuisines or new recipes.
However, if you are chopping an onion and hold the knife wrong, hold the onion wrong, or make the wrong cuts, it is not only slower but it is also more dangerous. If your knife is dull, you push the knife harder, and that is more dangerous. If chopping an onion is safe, you can move faster. It is a simple skill to learn and everyone who cooks should learn it.
Missing the related point from the comment is... what? Deliberate?
(E.g 99.9 being 40 min would mean that 999 out of 1 000 people got it done faster than 40 min)
A recipe is not a black box. Most recipes are short and can be written on a half page of paper. If it calls for two chopped onions and you know that it takes you an “eternity” to chop onions, then add two eternities to the cooking time.
And as long as you are spending two eternities chopping onions, why not spend 90 seconds watching a video on YouTube that explains how to do it correctly? For most people—if you are cooking regularly, and practicing good technique, you will naturally get faster over time. If, like many people, you are cooking for decades, then you will be slow for only a short time.
I forgot an /s. 99.9 percentile would require doing each meal in the cooking book ... 1000 or 10 000 times by different people to get an accurate timing :)
> chopping onions, why not spend 90 seconds watching a video on YouTube that explains how to do it correctly?
That sounds like a good idea, could get back 1 000 x those two minutes, in a lifetime, and more yummy food and can impress others with the onion skills. (No /s here. I'll try to remember tomorrow, youtube.)
And yes an onion can be chopped in seconds. There are youtube videos on it. Worth learning.
It sounds a bit dorky, but it really helps to look up on YouTube how a pro cuts an onion for example. You'll realise that most people are cutting them wrong, and that the "correct" way speeds up the cutting process massively.
Always when discussing recipes with friends (I realize now how curiously frequent that is) the stated time is almost always too low for most people. So you're far from alone there, even among people who "can cook".
I consider myself and my wife equals in cooking, but she is definitely much faster than me, and is of the rare kind who can complete most (new) recipes within the specified time, while I prepare slower and always go back many times to double check things. But she's the outlier, not me, at least from my anecdotes.
I could probably work on chopping faster and less "perfectionistic", but the recipe part after getting used to dishes is where I make up most time after a few times.
Once you get a hang of a region's cuisine, you get a feel for how measurements fit and what seasoning works, and that's how I like to cook.
Which is also why I don't like baking, since there's a lot less wiggle room for improv.
It's definitely partly practice, but make sure you have a decently sharp knife (you don't need to get anything ridiculously expensive but you should be paying ~£20 for one knife). The cheap "sharp knives" you get for £20-30 for a whole set tend to not actually be that sharp and make it really difficult to cut through things like onions because they slip all over the place.
I got my high quality but very old knives professionally sharpened a few months ago. It made a world of difference and cost something like £25 for 5 chef's knives, scissors and a serrated bread knife.
The guys I went to (in south London [1]) do most of their business renting knife sets to restaurants: each chef has two sets of knives; every few weeks they come by to drop of the newly sharpened set and take the other set away to sharpen back at their workshop.
Their tip is rather than paying full retail price for quality knives, buy knives through them. They'll recommend what's best for your needs and budget. You can save even more by buying from their restaurant rental stock, freshly resharpened, for something like 1/8th of what you'd pay new in a store.
[1] http://www.collini.co.uk/ in Balham (55 Fontenoy Road, SW12 9LX). If you take your knives to them for sharpening, you can watch them do it, on large, 1950s era motorised grindstones. Absolutely fascinating.
A few things:
* It will show you how to cut and the correct techniques to use. Have a look at the Amazon 'look inside' to see how to cut onions, carrots and asparagus
* When cutting things like carrots, are you cutting one carrot or multiple? (the next point is important for this)
* Are your knives sharp? There should be almost no effort cutting through a carrot, for example.
Background to Leiths:
* They're a real cooking school that teaches professional chefs assuming very little knowledge
* It was set up by Prue Leith and Caroline Waldegrave. Prue Leith is one of the judges on the Great British Bakeoff.
* Leiths is well known in London for both their professional courses and for amateur ones too (e.g. a day to de-bone a chicken)
For some reason those skills are not listed most cook books and I certainly didn't learn them in school.
Cooking is a nice break from screen-based activities. I put a podcast or some music on, and cook myself something nice. Since it's a hobby, I don't worry too much about efficiency.
That being said, after making a recipe once or twice, I always transcribe them, along with minor optimisations. Unlike some recipe creators, I don't have a dish washer, so these little optimisations matter.
Try doing a few meals in a row with similar ingredients and chop once for like the next 2-3 days (depending on what's being chopped).
Also you can try timing yourself. See how long it takes to chop an onion, record it. Now you know the REAL prep time for a recipe based on it's ingredients.
What really saves time is having an idea what order you're going to do things and how to parallelize tasks, but for that you need to have some intuition about time so you don't accidently burn something. There's a recipe I make that takes twice as long if strictly prepped first then cooked.
Also, just going to state the obvious, but if you're cooking for more than two people, it's just always much harder.
That said, I suspect that ability to clean and cook at the same time comes with experience and comfort with the cooking task. If imagine the same goes for socializing while cooking. Some meals I can do on autopilot and have the connotative capacity for other tasks, while others I ask the family to give give me some room to focus.
But I burnt many things before I got the timing down. You can do half the dishwasher while eggs are frying and no more.
The goal is for max runny yolk with juuuuust solid whites and no crispy brown on bottom.
What makes it fun is that I make it a game of optimizing concurrency.
I just love thinking ahead and planning what operations go in what order, how, when, how few trips to the same cupboards and drawers I can make, etc.
I can make scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and some fruit or yogurt for a family of four in six minutes without leaving a mess. (The bacon used to double the time until I decided to use a second pan and pay the price of cleaning two)
Instruction fetch: ordering on the touchscreen.
Instruction decoding: each component of the order gets routed to the functional unit that can handle it.
Separate functional units: fries, burger flipping, burger assembly, fridge, etc.
Superscalar: multiple functional units to do the same operation (flipping, assembly)
Pipelines: different phases (fetch/decoding/execution/store in register) happen in parallel for different instructions.
Speculative execution: the most common sub-orders (e.g. Big Mac, basic cheeseburgers) are executed before they are ordered and wait in the sub-pipeline (rack slide) until completion.
Write to register: take the results from the different funcitonal units and putting them in your bag.
Edit: TIL You can! Click its timestamp, then favourite at the top.
I start cleaning/tidying up myself when cooking, but only "easy to clean" stuff, because more than once I have been burned by focusing too long on cleaning something more difficult to clean (or rather my food was burned a little).
If you batch together cooking as well as cleaning tasks just because they both happen to be in the kitchen one ends up getting overwhelmed by both context switching as well as motivation.
1. Familiar recipes?
2. New recipes?
3. New categories of cuisine?
Are you able to integrate dishwashing activities with similar aplomb and efficiency in each of these categories?
What is the extreme end of this, anyway? Is the auctor asserting that we hold our lives for the week it takes for various form of dough to ferment till readiness? simply staring at the fridge that houses it?
This is also the problem with this philosophy: the vague definition of when a task be “done” or “still ongoing”.
What you are describing would work as an analogy for hyperthreading / smt though. Not all ressources are used because one needs to wait for things to be ready. So you do something else to keep busy in the same space as the rest of your kitchen.
It's a shame that the top comment is calling out the analogy and completely missing the point of the article, though.
That damn pop ding Messenger notification sound is like a dog whistle for many people; instantly dropping what they're doing and picking up their phones to follow this sound.
I wonder how this generation will be able to remain focused with all of the distractions that keep popping up around them.
Right now I use my watch for alarms (for sleep), pager duty alerts and fitness/sleep/health related stuff.
Previously I would have pulled my phone out of my pocket to look every time it vibrated. Its also a super quick swipe and tap to turn on do not disturb mode on the watch so you get no notifications or calls (there is an exemption list too I think)
That makes it easier for me to notice the occasional semi-urgent family ping while otherwise ignoring notifications.
Admittedly, it took some tuning to get notifications on the watch to NOT be a distraction. I suspect that, for most people, having all notifications off by default would be better. But I also have a feeling that many people don’t ever figure out how to adjust the notifications, so if the watch shipped with “mute” as the default many people would never even realize it was capable of receiving notifications in the first place.
My Apple Watch:
* is a heart rate monitor
* a blood oxygen monitor
* an exercise tracker
* a music control device when exercising
* a volume control device for my airpods
* an enabler of checking phone calls easily without taking phone out of pocket
* a *very* rudimentary sleep tracker.
It was also really nice in the recent Puget Sound power outages as a flashlight.
edit: formatting
Are there good features to help lower the distraction level? Do you find it useful (and worth the price) for the passive health tracking stuff?
Disable all notifications on it and it quickly evolves into a regular watch on your wrist.
> Do you find it useful (and worth the price) for the passive health tracking stuff?
It's a nice companion to an Apple device in the Apple ecosystem; and, if you're someone that's not into Fitbit for whatever reason, I've found it fine.
I also own the least expensive Apple Watch 6, as I was using it as a test device to see if I'd be interested in staying in the ecosystem. I don't see a reason to leave it.
I've also bought one for my mother - who immediately disabled all notifications, too, for herself; and, she quite likes it so far. I asked her to turn on fall notification and we're friends on Apple Fitness Sharing or whatever it's called.
I think it's fine and it serves my needs. I would need to look at the market again for another device that has over a day of battery life (always-on screen off, no notifications), an O2 sensor, heartrate sensor, doesn't fight with my PiHole or VPN (Fitbit did not like me being on a VPN) and other features if I'm in the mood for them.
I use Apple Pay all the time, so it's nice there, as well.
I mean, I'm happy?
Personally I leave on all notifications that would show on my phone because I find looking at my watch less distracting than taking out my phone.
If you purely want health features, there are many cheaper options but I'd be cautious about the accuracy of the sub $100 watches. You might find like me that the watch is useful for a load of things you didn't think of. Using apple pay on my watch is slightly nicer than on the phone, setting timers is slightly quicker, checking the weather is slightly quicker, etc.
I find myself using the watch a lot for these tasks because its simply faster and lets me get back to what I was doing quicker.
Perhaps the latest gen with LTE and all the other health functions would make it useful, but I'm very hesitant to give it another try.
This probably results in some kind of ripple effect much like traffic in-efficiencies. If pre-corona traffic in some of the major metropolitan cities is any indicator, we're nearing a point where progress for most will be significantly slowed whilst those who fly above the top, avoiding messenger based distractions entirely, will suddenly have infinite time and blue seas abound.
In my opinion, it's time to disable notifications when in a context that isn't messaging, and use an emergency-style app to bypass disabled notifications so one won't miss anything time-sensitive in 2021.
After transitioning to remote work during lockdown, chat&calls suddenly become mandatory to look at ASAP. Now I sometimes get multiple urgend messages while beeing on a surprising call. In the office, these people would see that I'm busy and wait. Now I have to line them up and prioritize them myself..
It took me a while to figure out that a few hours of this process could ruin a full day of productivity + requires much more mental work to regenerate after.
I do have ADHD though - so this is one of my biggest issues even under normal circumstances.
Still it is not convenient to hold onto a send button to do that. I wish messengers operated noiseless by default and had a special “ding” button to request attention. It could even be used alone, just to remind your peer that they are blocking the important process and it would be nice to see an update on ETA.
The cost of context switching can be reduced, and reducing it is one of the most important job skills and productivity gains you can get. It will also reduce your frustration.
Break up your mental model of what you are doing into smaller tasks. Compartmentalize. Encapsulate. If you are in the middle of something so intricate that you would forget what you were doing if you stepped away from it for a few minutes, persist that state somewhere outside your brain -- write it down!
Very few of us are in a position where we can lock ourselves away from others for hours of deep work at a time. So, focus on reducing the impact of the interruptions!
Another problem is figuring out what’s next to schedule. Visualizing your task as a non-ordered list doesn’t work well. What you need is to order your work with a priority queue.
Another problem is interrupts: what are the things that take you out of a task? For example, emails, notifications, etc.
Another problem is the noisy neighbor problem: you might get disrupted by other people’s performance, or what they’re working on, or your own lack of progress, etc. The solution of course was given by Feynman: disregard!
write down the state before using it, and if you get interrupted you can recover.
It keeps the deck clear but at a huge efficiency cost. Some people just can’t stand untidiness, yet learning to live with mid-process untidiness — and the associated anxiety — is a big step towards being more productive.
It is certainly not easy. When coding, I feel a great anxiety if I am mid solution and have a large amount of the current batch left to complete. It is as if I had taken a gulp of air and dived under the water into a cave. Batching involves being able to commit to living without safety checkpoints, and to be able to get a batch complete in the time allotted. If you don’t, you risk having a large pile of four-fifths completed batches.
Most context switching isn’t voluntary, and isn’t controllable.
This doesn't work for all types of coding, but I've found that TDD (test-driven development) helps a _ton_ with eliminating large batches, as well as reducing cognitive load. The trick with TDD though is that it's simple to learn, but hard to master.
Another good practice is to reduce the "blast radius" of changes so that you're dealing with one thing at a time. For example, don't introduce a new type (class, interface) as a method parameter while implementing the new type while writing tests for it while changing all of the callers of the method to use the new type. One (small) thing at a time, and prefer to keep everything compiling and working except for that one thing you're working on.
As for cooking etc., I differentiate between "tidy" and "clean". Mid-process dirty is common, but I strongly prefer to keep my working area relatively tidy throughout.
With practice, it's possible to train yourself to get back into focus faster after being interrupted or context switching. It doesn't completely cancel out the costs, but having a strategy to get back into focus helps immensely.
The worst mistake I see people make is assuming that focus is something that only strikes serendipitously, and is ruined on the first signs of interruption. Once you accept that focus can, in fact, be cultivated and interruptions can be overcome with deliberate effort to re-focus, it becomes much easier to start training yourself to get back into the flow.
The other mistake I see people make is letting minor interruptions spiral into an impromptu 30-minute break of checking HN, browsing Twitter, or other distractions until they feel like getting back to work. Don't like your own habits amplify existing distractions.
I agree with his overall point about the costs of context switching (and was disappointed that he didn't talk about the low level issues of coordination on multithreaded systems) but this seems like an odd candidate for "best analogy".
When I moved to a new house a few years ago, we initially lacked an organizer tray as is typically used to keep silverware sorted in the drawer. Our solution, which we thought was temporary until we bought one, was to unceremoniously and clatteringly dump all the silverware into the same drawer, and to pick out what we wanted at mealtime.
Three years later, we're still doing it and have concluded that it's much better system. Sorting silverware was always one of my least favorite parts of putting away washed dishes, and now it is trivial: dump the entire basket from the dishwasher into the drawer, often while grinning with joy. And I don't think I've once become angry at the extra time of searching for a spoon or a fork.
Consider, if we're being technical, that the primary advantage of presorting happens when you can sort once and take advantage of the ordering many times. But with silver, it's once-in and once-out. Sorting all at once isn't actually faster, it's just preloading the pain. Also note that you can fit a lot more silverware into a drawer unsorted. Having twice as many spoons and forks might reduce utilization, but silverware is cheap and having more makes finding what you want a lot easier.
Anyway, you know the standard advice to measure before you optimize? Given my positive experience with the unsorted method, I wonder if he's even tried the approach he's using as a central negative example. Personally, I'd suggest that more people should try it!
2) Sort silverware when you put it into the dishwasher.
3) ???
4) Profit!
Actually, just buy a dishwasher with a third rack regardless, because it's so much better.
When I have to do frontend implementations, switching between tabs and screens, I can work for much less time and I constsntly lose focus before essentially burning out for the day.
Absolutely no data is given to back up this assertion, and even if data were given in some research, it would be some kind of average value, selected from a sample size of, say, 20-25 year old, disproportionally male Californiamen, who all studied at the same university, and were all willing to donate their time for some undergraduate research and obtain 50 U.S.D. in return, and the data would already reveal immense spread and variability with clearly around 40% at least heavily increasing productivity by switching, but the article would stress that the average would not, and thus advocate that no man so “context switch”.
Yes, practicing batching will make one more efficient at it, but practicing context switching will also make one more efficient at it,and the true reason is that many tasks require one to wait for something else and do nothing.
The reason why I'm already washing many of the dishes I cooked with as I cooked is of course simple: there is nothing to do except stirring once in a while at a certain stage in cooking so I might as well use that time to do something else.
I also took various sips of my coffee writing this, not because I had nothing else to do, but because it tasted nice.
I am not sure that is true at all. The more I do the more it saps my motivation.
The issue of filling waiting time is understandable, but recognizing the cost of switching to various tasks can still be useful in determining how to fill your time. Something that doesn’t take you out of what you were already doing will always be better than something completely unrelated and possibly information-loaded.
I'm interested in your experience here, have you found that you were able to switch context more effectively with practise?
My own experience is different: when I'm in an environment where I am being constantly switched, I find myself tending to tasks that require less mental effort in anticipation of the switch. It's a death spiral for me and not something I'd like to practise.
An even better example would be the video game of StarCraft II that I once played frequently that is known for it's high demands of the multitasking ability of the player. If context switching and multitasking could not be trained, players could not become better at that game as they do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bexWuHmV32A#t=7m58
This is most certainly not something one is born with; this comes after years of dedicated training.
That rings some bells. My observation is that I did not get better at switching, but once I’ve got used to timings of building/preparing something, it greatly reduced the anxiety for not getting things in sync, which in turn removed a decision paralysis (a bit), which kicks in even if I have a plenty of time to plan ahead. I still have trouble with remembering to adjust macro when apm has to be retained at high marks.
“awareness”, as it is called in StarCraft II, is definitely a skill that improves with training.
Seasoned players remain aware of what other tasks must also be done while they are devoting attention to one and thus allocate their attention better.
I personally never had the panic freezes that some new players have in this game, but I did remember having them in StarCraft I at the initial stages, but as I improved I indeed became more aware.
Brain scans of StarCraft II players at high level also indicated that they actually play large parts of the game not with higher, cognitive function, but with lower brain functions which is another thing that improves with training that the article speaks of in terms of cognition, becoming better at it entails assimilating more and more actions into autonomous reactions allowing for better multi tasking, which certainly also reflects upon cooking and computer tasks when many of the actions become more autonomous.
It's about as far-fetched as saying that one can plan a boxing match.
There is certainly less possibility of planning than cooking.
Instead, if you were to play a different strategy game for 30 min, or prepare a speech for 30 min -- that'd be a more real & problematic context switch.
(I've played starcraft btw, and cook food with many sauce pans.)
... that continually interrupt your attention?
This would happen maybe in one out of a hundred cases if at all, making the statement blatantly false.
How can I trust that anything the author says will be minimally rigorous about a topic as complex as cognition when they’re making such outlandish claims, even if they’re being facetious?
When I bake pizza rolls for instance: I need to make the dough, fill it with ham and cheese and then bake them. Of course that are idle time in between those steps (letting the dough proof and baking, for instance) so I insert a small task in between. Like making coffee or mayonnaise. Looks like I'm doing a whole bunch of things at the same time, but I'm not. I'm making just one task of "preparing a meal".
I've noticed context switching is costy at my current job. When I'm working on a feature usually I have to wait for my boss to do a code review. During that time I usually start a new feature. When I have to work in two features simultaneously that's when I make a lot of mistakes (usually small mistakes due to lack of attention).
I much rather work at one thing at the time.
these 2 numbers need to be compared...
* I'm sure some people are better at it than others
* Some work is easier to switch to and from
* Some work demands it—e.g., people in supporting roles that will put up with constant interruptions in order to help others
Throw into the mix that some people are better than others at deluding themselves about their abilities to context switch (or handle distractions in general), or who simply struggle focusing on a single task for hours at a time.
Personally, I don't find meetings and random conversations too bad. But if I have to completely unload a complicated task from memory and replace it with something else, coming back to the original task can often feel like starting from scratch.
Other things to think about:
* Figure 2 here—
http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S...
—from a study showing how "time spent on value-added tasks" drops if working on 3 or more parallel projects
* For other reasons (e.g., for faster feedback cycles, reducing overhead), batching isn't always a good idea. Here's a fun video showing that contrary to intuition, batching isn't always faster:
- Cleaning the bathroom
- Wiping the poop off the toilet bowl
- Polishing the silverware
- Vacuuming the car
- Shopping
- Fixing a syntax error in some code
- Washing the car
- Eating a hamburger
If you don't think batching / chunking is useful, try swapping ramdomly between these tasks and leaving them partially done and resuming. The context switch costs should be abundantly clear. Especially if you add in some travel time.
Multitasking relies on tricks and effort to actually work. Not even computers get to multitask (until you add more cores). Context switching is still required. Even going from user to kernel space involves some cost.
Listening to music, chewing gum and walking is only multitasking because these are using complementary or different "cores". Real multitasking requires independent pathways. Try reading three books at the same time. Or drinking coca-cola and some fine wine. This is my usual challenge for multitaskers. The books and the drinks wont fully be appreciated if you attempt them via simultaneous multitasking. The context switch isn’t trivial and if not properly done always has negative outcomes.
Especially the coke and wine combination. Nasty.
A continuous integration system doesn’t batch jobs; it starts working on a job the moment it arrives. Would it be better if CI jobs were arranged into batches that were processed, say, twice a day?
I would not want the front desk of a hotel to batch the processing of my request for a room with all the others received in the last hour so that the front desk person can maximize their sense of efficiency.
In seeking to maximize the efficiency of each business operation at the local level, do we wind up harming performance of the company as a whole?
What is the goal?
If you add a _lot_ of people to a problem solving/analysis context (e.g. open source/crowd sourcing) you throw out the constraint of "shared understanding" and win by probability with many different minds partially thinking about the problem. This takes longer of course-- because the project maintainers then have to sift through the crowd's input.
The goal has to be understand the form of work, and adjust the levers accordingly.
That sounds more like part of the work involved in manufacturing software than what you refer to as problem solving / analysis.
What if the author decided to batch the processing of pull requests so that they processed all of their outstanding PRs once per week?
Would that be a good thing for the rest of the team? What if you're trying to deliver an important fix and your PR is stuck in queue waiting for Friday to roll around before the author gets around to review it?
The late Colonel John Boyd made important observations as to the competitive advantages that accrue to organizations that can move quickly and well-enough to accomplish the mission.
I certainly could be wrong, but batching everything, as the author seems to be suggesting, sounds like a recipe for an organization that is slow as molasses in January, but also populated with people who see themselves as being highly efficient.
What am I not seeing?
I thought this was a bit absurd. Good article nonetheless though, I can see how getting into a routine about when you will perform specific tasks throughout the day would be more productive.
A few days ago there was also the blog about the UK Covid variant that was just nonsense.
Is it dividing by work type (eg coding, responding emails, writing documents, etc) and doing all the tasks in one type before going to the next?
I don't know. Good music helps me concentrate.
Something like:
I don't think that context switching costs more than I give it credit for, because I already consider it to be outrageously expensive.
I am not a fan of IM platforms, like Slack. I don't listen to music while I'm coding, and I schedule my life around coding sessions; not the other way around.
I seem to get a lot done.
I was a manager for many years, and I had a few basic philosophies (that I sometimes had to shelve, because, corporation):
1) It was my job to act as an "interruption shield" for my team.
If one of my managers, or outside developers wanted information or access that required one of my team stop what they were doing, and attend, then it was my job to be "bad cop," and say "no," or "wait."
I often wouldn't even let my team member know that they would have an interruption, until they came up for air.
2) It was my job to know what my team was doing; not their job to tell me what they were doing.
This meant no standups (except that I didn't have a choice, as it was policy, so we had useless standups; even though I didn't want them). If I needed regularly scheduled meetings, I would schedule them in a fashion that would reduce the likelihood of interrupting developer "flow."
It also meant using things like infrastructure tools, integration testing, and frequent checkins to monitor progress. It was my job to interpret them, and ask questions; not my team's job to send me reports (except that I was required to send a weekly report, so I had to gather reports every Thursday. I worked around that, by letting my team members send a quick, one-paragraph email, then annotating that with details from my observations).
3) I made sure that my team was always able to take care of family and life priorities.
I cannot stress enough the importance of this. I had a team of experienced developers with families and medical issues. These would always take priority over their work, and I'd be a coldhearted S.O.B. to refuse to acknowledge that.
I wasn't real big on letting them have "me" time, but, if they needed to run out to get their kid out of school in a hurry, I would let them do that. Otherwise, I'd get to hear them spending three hours on the phone, trying to get relatives to step in and help.
If they were doing something like selling/buying a house, or having contractors in, I'd support them doing what was needed, but I would insist on making sure they got whatever tasks needed doing out of the way.
I also encouraged them to confide in me, issues like divorces, and severe medical issues. I did that by being empathetic, and also closed-mouth. Sometimes, I violated company policy by not informing people of issues with employees, as it would have been completely inappropriate. If the issue ended up causing a disaster (it never did, in over 25 years), then I would take the fall.
I learned that lesson, real quick.
4) Classic Management 101: Things go well, I highlight the team. Things go bad, I take the heat.
This meant that they felt supported in taking risks, and going down rabbitholes, and not having to spend time in a panic, if the avenue they were exploring wasn't giving good results.
5) The smallest unit of schedule time was 1 day. In extreme circumstances, I would schedule for half days.
This allowed context switching to happen in normal cycles.
In my experience, this ended up with a very productive team, that worked well together, was extremely motivated, cohesive, honorable and honest, and highly productive. I kept engineers on board for decades.
But that was just me. YMMV.
I would rather iterate over several intermediate datasets, than going into some tedious other way.
A computer is a machine. Why go into abstraction if your project is not complex?
It seems developers believe that going into higher abstraction is like using analogies, they think it's like using a new form of language so that other developers might understand what they're doing.
Of course there is a minimum of code readability, reusability and maintainability, but in the end, a computer is best as looping linear data.