The most telling thing about this article is that not five words into my first introduction, my Gmail reminder popup came up demanding attention, and my automated reflexes immediately clicked on the little window to see what the hopeful mailer wanted. The side effect? It completely derailed my train of thought I had to work myself back into it. QED.
I have had no small number of conversations with my boss about the nature of Work-Life balance. Today’s everyday wisdom says that you have to keep both your personal and professional life properly segregated if you want to lead a happy life, and yet work continues to raise it’s ugly head once I leave the office. Case and point: I’ve been in the office most of the weekend trying to complete some tasks that I was unable to complete during the week, and even now I’m having a hard time even thinking about them in such a way that I can complete them and finally go home. Frustrated, I flipped back over to my browser and read my RSS feeds to clear my head, an came across an article on multitasking that allowed me to frame the problem in a way that made some sense: It’s not the work-life balance that I need to deal with, it’s the work-work balance.
The author in the article makes a reference to something called "dual task interference", which in a nutshell means that the brain cannot really do more than one thing at a time. You can switch between different tasks fairly rapidly, but according to research (citations for which I have yet to find, apparently there was a study at Stanford) doing so dramatically reduces your mental capacity for both tasks. You end up not firing on all cylinders when you’re trying to accomplish more than one thing at once.
Lets take this into the office space: Let’s say you, like myself, are a developer who sits on an open floor. It’s easy for others to walk up to you and ask questions, and depending on where you sit on the team you could be pulled into a variety of meetings haphazardly scheduled throughout the day with breaks of intermittent length. You have neither door, cube walls, nor some way of shielding yourself from the rest of the world (except for maybe headphones). Now from a management and collaboration standpoint this environment is great: All the resources are readily available to each other, you can have impromptu discussions if you hit a roadblock or if something interesting comes up, and questions can be directly posed rather than sent (and forgotten) via email. Personally I love these environments because I’m very extroverted, and it feels like I’m working at a party, which given the conclusion presented here means I’m probably one of the worst offenders.
Let’s take a look at this from the perspective of interference: Every time someone asks you a question, you’re distracted from your task, and your brain is trying to both not forget where you left off the task while also coming up with an answer. Every time you see an email popup come up, you’re distracted. Every time a coworker IM’s you, or you have to start prepping for a meeting in 15 minutes, or something that’s important to someone else needs to get done your mind starts splitting itself and you get, to put a fine point on it, stupid. The very act of creating an environment conducive to collaboration guarantees that your employees aren’t working at their peak capacity.
There are aggravating factors as well: Do you have your IM client running? How about new email notification? Do you have an automated process in your brain that loads up your RSS reader every half hour? SMS? Weather warnings? Twitter? A low battery beep on your cell phone? All of these will similarly distract you, and chances are that anyone working at a computer these days has no less than 2, maybe 4 things occupying their attention at any given point in time.
On top of that, we developers have to construct systems that requires quite a bit of mental capacity, and having a question fielded by another team member on a different topic right when we’re in the middle of something is much like wiping a magnet across a disk drive: You have to get back into your code, remember where you were, reconstruct the logical process you were following and then pick up where you left off. For small tasks this isn’t much of a problem, but if your application is particularly complicated…. well, speaking for myself it takes anywhere from 10-30 minutes to reconstruct where I was, assuming another interruption or meeting doesn’t come along.
The natural conclusion of this is that it is in the best interest for yourself as a developer, your company, your clients and practically everyone on your team that you cut out as many distractions as possible. Yes, the current generation is all about being instantly and constantly connected, but to actually accomplish something you have to let it all go. Turn off your IM client, schedule certain periods of time when you check email rather than leaving it open, block out time during the day when you simply refuse to attend meetings, and be ready to ask a coworker to bring his question back at another time.
In short, learn how to Singletask, to focus exclusively on what’s in front of you.