It’s actually even worse than that I think. If something takes over a certain amount of time, then I’m more likely to go do something else while I wait, like check Hackernews. And there goes 20 minutes.
Then if I have a command that will take a while, like a stupidly long `git status`, I do `git status && beep`.
This is something that's really a degradation of the newer generations of engineers, since I clearly remember the time where these "somethings" would never take less than a couple minutes, and people did not immediately flee to their nearest distraction, but actually planned their time around it. In fact, if you go further back, these "somethings" would have taken hours, and the older generations still got work done.