We saw this article about interruptions, and it is right on the money! Here’s a taste:
Interruptions are to developers what kryptonite is to Superman—they kill productivity and there’s a significant recovery period.
There are two types of interruption: the planned meeting and the one where someone walks over to your desk to talk to you (or if you’re unlucky enough to have a desk phone it’s when the phone rings). The random interruption is akin to walking up to a someone building a lego tower, kicking it over and expecting them to continue from where they were the moment before you arrived. The planned meeting is a lot longer and kills productivity before, not just during and after. So, there are two types of problem that need addressed here.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A DEVELOPER IS INTERRUPTED?
A huge amount of what a developer is doing is in their head. As we write code we need to keep a mental model of how parts of the application that have already been written and are yet to be written interact with the part that we are writing at that moment. We need to have a solid picture of exactly how the code is working as a whole and maintain that picture. It’s not easy, it requires a lot of concentration and has to remain in place while we think of creative and efficient ways to solve the problem at hand.
Developers can appear very unproductive at times, sitting staring at the screen with our headphones on and very little in the way of keyboard clackety-tap. This however is when we are doing our thinking, when we are building up, adding to and rearranging the mental model of how our code will work. This is the biggest and hardest part of development.
Imagine how it feels to have that interrupted at random by a telephone call or somebody walking over to talk to you. It’s horrible.
This picture explains it very well.
Read the original article at http://thetomorrowlab.com/2015/01/why-developers-hate-being-interrupted/
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