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Intense focus increases performance right up until the point where burnout or exhaustion causes performance to absolutely collapse.

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research has shown that the longer work in one day the lower your performance gets. meaning that eg in the first 4 hours i get 60% of my work done and in the remaining 4 hours 40% simply because i get tired later in the day. (numbers made up for illustration purposes only)

4 hours of pair programming per day can therefore possibly be enough to make up for the increased loss of performance in the rest of the day.

The world is full of examples of companies that reward people who are more productive in a few hours by letting them go home instead of raising expectations and working them to death, I assume.

i get where you are coming from, but i suspect that the company that does that would also exhaust people without pair programming. bad work environments exist, and yeah, those are probably not the places where you want to introduce pair programming.

That's why breaks exist.

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