Some days an interruption will throw me off my train of thought, and I spend the remaining six hours collecting discarded bottles and railway ties for hopeful use somewhere, somehow, sometime.
Other days an interruption costs me pretty much nothing.
I’m still trying to figure out how to tell which of those days I’m going to have and whether to just not log into Slack for the day.
karmakaze · 3h ago
I've found one thing that minimizes interruption cost: pair programming. At one startup we pair programmed all day, every day. Resuming from an interruption was almost seamless. Can't explain it, only experienced it.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
If only I wouldn’t prefer stabbing myself in the leg with a rusty knife over pair programming.
dylan604 · 2h ago
I've never done official pair programming, but I get frustrated when I'm not on the keyboard as I find others think slower.
kmoser · 2h ago
Have you tried plugging in a second keyboard and taking over where necessary? I do a lot of remote work in which my colleague and I work on the same computer and it's quite useful for either of us to jump in with our own keyboard (and mouse). It does take a bit of occasional verbal negotiation to agree on who really knows what to do (and can do it fastest) but if you communicate well then it's pretty easy.
karmakaze · 1h ago
Right I only call using the same computer pair programming. Now working remote (with Tuple app) it's still two keyboards/mice on one computer (sometimes mine, sometimes theirs), though it's infrequent for specific tasks.
bn-l · 1h ago
Damn I wish I had a relationship with someone like that.
karmakaze · 1h ago
I usually prefer to be navigator than driver. It's the navigator that does the high level thinking. The one at the keyboard is the one who's usually better at typing and writing out the design patterns that are agreed upon. Of course we did swap roles routinely, maybe several times a day. Oh and to top it off we switched pairing partners every week or two. It was a brutal experiment but I learned a lot and I'd say it was a great success.
saagarjha · 1h ago
I find that working with people who are smarter than I am helps a lot with this.
glxxyz · 2h ago
"no the other one, down a bit, no the one above, no go back..."
No comments yet
cosmic_cheese · 1h ago
I think the only thing that might be more frustrating is if my modifier keys rotated at random intervals.
karmakaze · 1h ago
Funny you should mention it. I have different computers with different keyboard layouts--including for some reason[0] modifier keys on only the left side being different on one.
[0] That's the gaming PC I play StarCraft 2 on and I found it simpler to always leave it in one mode than switching back and forth.
CGamesPlay · 1h ago
I suspect that this would also lead to interruptions having almost no effect on your productivity.
jiggawatts · 1h ago
When pair programming was a fad in the early 2000s, I tried it with a coworker for a security-critical piece of code that needed two pairs of eyes on it.
It felt horrendously unproductive to have two people at one keyboard but we compared commit rates and the surprising result was that we produced the same rate of changes as working separately.
SJMG · 1h ago
Just wait till you learn about "mobbing"… You can feel the money being lit on fire.
Our_Benefactors · 1h ago
This fad died out along with 0% money.
wordpad · 1h ago
Have you tried giving your AI productivity tool a personality so it can guilt trip you the same way?
karmakaze · 1h ago
That's an interesting idea, adding an AI so it could be you pair programming with a colleague remotely over Tuple, a truple. Seriously though it would take out the frustration and flow-breaking pauses while interacting with an LLM.
mettamage · 2h ago
How can you find a startup with a pair programming culture?
lazyasciiart · 1h ago
They’ll tell you.
karmakaze · 1h ago
So true. I interviewed at one where a half day was spent pair-programming with one of the team's devs doing TDD: write a test, make it green, refactor.
yablak · 2h ago
Join a startup. If they don't do pair programming, quit.
neves · 7m ago
As I get older, I feel I take more time to get back on track.
I don't feel less intelligent, maybe more experience compensates for it. I probably make less wrong turns. But I have to be more rigid to prevent interruptions.
cookiengineer · 42m ago
For me the deciding factor was whether or not I had tests available for that task to get right back into it.
If I don't have tests available, I always need to re-read so much code that it feels like having to start all over again to be able to get a mental picture of the complexity.
I started to love Go for that very reason, because I always have my state written down in the form of unit tests while I am implementing it. This removes so much burden of thought after I got interrupted, because all edge cases I can write down and I don't have to actively try to remember them. Go made me fall in love with Test Driven Development, again.
bubblebeard · 3h ago
My feelings exactly. Whenever I get one of those days I’ve found I get more done away from my desk. Taking a walk in the forest or doing some household chores can really help you get back on track.
Of course at times it’s just better to admit altogether this isn’t a day meant for work and spend it relaxing instead. Usually, the benefit of that is a really productive day at work the day after too, everybody wins.
linhns · 4m ago
Same here. I often work more on the productive day if possible to maximise the roll I’m on
Waterluvian · 3h ago
Almost all my employers and managers have been very understanding about this. But one of my favourites was a manager earlier in my career who picked up that I was anxious about my work hours and ethic. To paraphrase, he said, “the company isn’t paying you to solve problems M-F 9-5. It’s paying you for when you solve them in the shower or on a walk or when you’re putting your kid to bed, and then come into work and implement the solution.”
I’ve thought about this for years as I tune my work life balance. I’ve never felt like I’m wrongly bringing work home with me that way. It’s always felt like an incredible optimization where my job gives me these puzzles I get to carry with me and work on when I’m bored or my ADHD addled brain screams for stimulation.
junon · 3h ago
You've been very lucky. I wish I had a similar experience. Managers who truly think that way are beautiful creatures.
pockybum522 · 3h ago
Do you happen to know if that one is hiring for anything at the moment? Left to solve problems at that pace, I'm pretty sure I could do some great things for them.
saagarjha · 1h ago
Most remote work gigs are basically this.
bongodongobob · 2h ago
I've never worked anywhere where I wouldn't be laughed at for suggesting this. "No, we do pay you to work from 9-5, M-F." You are very lucky.
dylan604 · 2h ago
This is one of the very best things to me about work from home. There are times I just get up and go piddle in the garden, take a short bike ride, or even just run an errand. I even do it when I'm stuck rather than just from being interrupted. It helps the brain to essentially, ctrl-z; bg and then move on to the next thing. When I return, I find the job %1 has completed, and I have a new approach/idea that is typically much more successful than the previous attempt of banging my head on the desk/keyboard in frustration. It's much healthier for me than vibe coding around the problem
jakeydus · 1h ago
Sorry my grandmother used to use the word piddle to mean pee so I got a real crack out of this.
__MatrixMan__ · 21m ago
I read it the same way and assumed they were piddling in the garden to add nitrogen to their compost.
apercu · 2h ago
100%!and also why I have been self employed for 11+ years.
nashashmi · 4h ago
So the average is 23 min 15 sec right?
Waterluvian · 3h ago
Ahahaha… I mean… gosh, quite possibly?
thecoppinger · 5h ago
Right there with you :)
PaulKeeble · 5h ago
This is a really common problem with science reporting in general. Its often the case that the news will say things about the paper that aren't in the paper, often they say something that is completely the opposite of what the paper actually represents with its data. Its become such a common thing and its very common when you can't find the referenced study itself from the article. Sometimes its the authors fault and they said things that aren't supported by the data but the science reporters do this a lot.
My basic rule on all science is go at least look at the papers abstract, method and their graphs/data. In 5 minutes you'll be better informed than the pop science article and it gets easier the more you read them.
Interruption do impact getting back in but I find it very variable, I actually if I am doing very strict TDD I recover from interruptions well. If I am busy thinking about a design or doing some more complex algorithm performance analysis its all happening in my head and they take longer. I think it is measurable and you could set up experiments to see how long it took to start producing again and if there is a slow start or not on a well defined programming task.
hinkley · 5h ago
When I work places where interruptions are expected I change how I do my work. So an observer may see them costing me less time but that’s amortized across the rest of my work as a consequence of leaning into interruption. It’s still there, it’s just spread out more.
falcor84 · 4h ago
> This is a really common problem with science reporting in general. Its often the case that the news will say things about the paper that aren't in the paper, often they say something that is completely the opposite of what the paper actually represents with its data.
I wonder if perhaps a part of LLM hallucinations can be explained by them being provided such reporting and having it (mistakenly) tagged as high-quality training data.
devmor · 2h ago
> I wonder if perhaps a part of LLM hallucinations can be explained by them being provided such reporting and having it (mistakenly) tagged as high-quality training data.
Probably (haha) far more of a function of temperature than training data. If the corpus is large enough for your prompt and you turn the temperature all the way down, you will get almost no hallucinations. You then have what is essentially a search engine.
godelski · 3h ago
> This is a really common problem with science reporting in general.
There's a lot that actually becomes really sinister with this. I'm sure the people writing those news articles pass them off as little white lies, "close enough", or whatever. And in some sense, there's a lot of truth to that. But the problems stem from what grows out of these "small errors" and into far larger ones.
1) it certainly contributes to a significant part of the g̶r̶o̶w̶i̶n̶g̶ distrust in science. People are getting their science from the news, not the horse's mouth. If you report something silly while saying "scientists say" then people will point the finger at the scientists more than they will point to the reporter. The scientists aren't writing in plain English after all[0]. Things like chocolate being healthy for you, red meat causing cancer, or machine learning quantum blackholes. There's always elements of truth to these things but truth is not sensational. Truth and complexity go hand in hand. As complexity decreases you will have to sacrifice accuracy. This is a tough balance to play[1].
2) The public isn't very scientifically literate and it is easy to misconstrue meaning. Hell, even scientists routinely struggle with this stuff. Let's take the red meat issue as an example. It's true, but a lot of those studies were looking at daily intake of 50g or 100g and results like "25% higher risk of rectal cancer" at the higher end of the estimates. For context, a Costco hotdog is 110g while a Nathan's Hotdog is 48. We're talking about 1-2 hotdogs per day. We're also talking about a percent increase in risk, not a percent risk. The CDC site says approximately 3.9% of men and women will be diagnosed with colorectal cancer. If that's our baseline then a 25% increase is a 4.9% risk. That's a disgusting amount of hotdogs to move from a 4% cancer risk to a 5%. Concerning on a national level but not on a personal. This feeds back to #1 as people are interpreting the news as saying "eating hotdogs makes you likely to get cancer" while people observe heavy hotdog eaters around them not getting cancer. Their observation wouldn't run counter to what the research says but it will against the narrative on the news. The incongruence between observation and understanding does justify mistrust. But there's just more ways to misinterpret something than there are to interpret correctly (relates to [2]). This failure mode becomes self-reinforcing. Enough that I think anyone that spends any time on the internet will be aware of it. (Communicating is fucking hard, communicating accurately is even harder)
3) (Perhaps the worst part) Scientists are primarily measured by their citations (count or "h-index"[3]). Unless you do something groundbreaking[4] (which is rare) then this is the main way to "measure" performance. A great way to boost citations is getting media attention. Unfortunately there's just a lot of papers published and a primary driver of citation count is knowledge of a paper's existence. You don't need to be an Avi Loeb type (it doesn't hurt) when we're talking about small numbers. If a Cal State grad student and a MIT grad student were to publish the same paper we'd expect the latter to have more citations due to the latter's greater visibility. MIT has a media wing and these papers are much more easily picked up by larger news orgs. This is why so many scientists use platforms like Twitter. Because your work doesn't mean anything (to your personal success and ability to continue doing your work) if you can't get enough citations. There's an obvious slippery slope here... One that can create a feedback loop to misreporting. The fiercer the competition the the more risky this situation becomes. It's really easy to do slight embellishments of your work. No one is checking at time of publication. Replication happens later and the system devalues replication. Plus, while replicating it is much easier to assume you've made a mistake rather than the paper was in error (or in serious error).
All this is to say that shit is messy. And I don't think any of it is particularly any one person's fault. More an emergent phenomena through compounding effects. Little things here and there add up as we talk about millions of events and many years. I know we all want things to be simple, and simplicity has a lot of benefits, but it also can be a big trap. "As simple as possible, but no simpler" does not mean something isn't extremely complex[5]. It's a trap that makes people think they can read a few lines from Wikipedia and understand something (read the whole article, it's still not enough). A trap with growing consequences to a world that grows in complexity[6]
[0] And I don't think w̶e̶ they should. Papers are a peer-to-peer communication network. Open and visible, but that's how the peer-to-peer communication takes place. Expert-to-public communication has traditionally been done through news or other science communicators. Asking scientists to write papers to the general public is like asking you to communicate to your coworker about your code as if your coworker knows nothing about code or the context it is running in (all because a layman may overhear). Good luck getting any work done...
[1] While news orgs and science communicators (especially pop sci communicators... ugh...) are doing harm here there are defenses anyone can take. Recognize your understanding is always wrong to some degree. Don't take in information as binary true/false statements but probabilities: e.g. likely true/maybe true/maybe false/likely false. Fundamentally the reason this is a good defense is because it is always a more accurate interpretation. Scientists don't find truth through confirmation but through negation. What I mean is w̶e̶ they rule things out. A scientist converges to truth[2]
[2] This also helps you sniff out conmen from the scientists. The scientist always has some doubt. At first they may show themselves as highly confident but as you press on detail they start weakening language. This isn't foolproof and isn't gonna work for every question, but it is common. Scientists are being more trained on media literacy because there is recognition that while this is the right way to talk to peers it gives the public a sense that they lack expertise rather than are aware of complexity. The best signal is just getting them to talk about their domain. They won't stop and will get very detailed.
[3] Number of papers with greater than N citations. An h-index of 10 is having 10 papers with >= 10 citations. h-index of 100 is 100 papers with >= 100 citations.
[4] If you do something groundbreaking no one gives a shit about citation count. But doing something groundbreaking will surely make your citation count skyrocket (often it also drives your h-index too, as you've simply gained more attention and more people are reading your other works. Your work doesn't change, but visibility does). This fact is often used to justify the usage of citation metrics. Citation metrics are fine, but they're also easy to hack and highly context driven. I mention Avi Loeb, and controversy is beneficial to this metric. Every paper that cites him to say he's wrong is a point for him. Controversy is a way to gather points from a whole new source! Not those building on your work, but those building against your work.
[5] "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough" is laughable phrase. The reason you can't teach "a barmaid" Quantum Chromodynamics isn't because you don't understand it. You can't explain it "simply" because you don't understand it. You can't explain it simply because you can't even use the word "color" without a layman thinking a quark is red (can you even get into how it is impossible to have "red" at that scale?).
[6] Progress necessitates an increase in complexity. Look at a Taylor Expansion and it's relationship to computational difficulty. I'll let you all figure this out, my comment is already too long.
4rt · 1h ago
thank you for your service, it was a very long comment but i read it all and found it insightful!
godelski · 1h ago
Thanks for reading. Topic hits close to home for me lol
> GMJ: How long does it take to get back to work after an interruption?
> Mark: There's good news and bad news. To have a uniform comparison, we looked at all work that was interrupted and resumed on the same day. The good news is that most interrupted work was resumed on the same day -- 81.9 percent -- and it was resumed, on average, in 23 minutes and 15 seconds, which I guess is not so long.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn · 3h ago
What was the bad news?
didibus · 3h ago
The full interview is all in the link. But specifically the bad news was:
> But the bad news is, when you're interrupted, you don't immediately go back to the task you were doing before you were interrupted. There are about two intervening tasks before you go back to your original task, so it takes more effort to reorient back to the original task. Also, interruptions change the physical environment. For example, someone has asked you for information and you have opened new windows on your desktop, or people have given you papers that are now arranged on your desk. So often the physical layout of your environment has changed, and it's harder to reconstruct where you were. So there's a cognitive cost to an interruption.
No comments yet
kehvyn · 4h ago
I think the anticipation of interruption caused by meetings might be worse, I end up losing a half hour on both ends.
Cerium · 3h ago
Oh how I hate a last minute rescheduling of a meeting. Feeling like I only have 30 minutes, I didn't start anything deep. Such a waste.
weikju · 4h ago
This is what kills my days. Other interruptions from coworkers usually are on topic and it’s always a pleasure to help out.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
Yep. For me, a meeting is half a day lost.
linhns · 8m ago
Nice post but please improve the website design for mobiles.
thomasfedb · 3h ago
If it was actually 23mins, and not modifiable, then a myriad of important professions would be completely unviable (e.g. medicine). That is to say, it seems doubtful that the impact of interruptions can be meaningfully summarised in a single figure.
godelski · 3h ago
It's interesting to me to see so many people here responding to the title or how many that "read" the article are making small quips.
Interesting because it is an active demonstration of their entire point.
glitchc · 5h ago
I've personally come to the conclusion that the novelty of the thought process is a big factor in recovery. Simply put, if I reach a conclusion that takes a rather unusual road through my mind, it's much harder to get back to after an interruption.
byronic · 2h ago
I actually thought this was going to reference the (earlier) 2000 Spolsky post (point 8 from https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...), which is itself dependent on the 15 minute per-person interruption cost (higher than 23m15s in aggregate time)
apercu · 5h ago
I’ve been saying for years that an interruption costs me _at least_ 15 minutes.
Knowledge work is not the same as physical work. Both are noble in my opinion, but not the same.
chatmasta · 43m ago
Knowledge and physical work is not the right distinction. It's fine for two broad categories, but within knowledge work there is — at the very least — the manager vs. maker schedule.
sublinear · 4h ago
I think interruptions are similar for both types of work.
Physical work does require some concentration as well, but imagine on top of that having to take off all your gear and walk into some makeshift office on site, deal with whatever bullshit they're bugging you about, and then go back out to your spot and get ready all over again.
Interruptions for any reason other than a true emergency is just poor planning caused by bad management.
apercu · 2h ago
Fair, but I guess I meant if I am moving tables around and someone asks me a question and I pause and answer I lose 10 seconds. If I’m deep in a much more complex problem I get a little derailed and almost have to start over.
sublinear · 2h ago
Sure, but what if the person moving the tables is in the middle of a larger logistical problem?
Caterers and guests are coming. More interruptions in the form of calls, texts, and emails don't stop and each is also "just 10 seconds".
I think it's pretty rare to find jobs where your role is so clearly defined that all you have to do is move tables. Most work asks that you solve a high level problem nobody else wants to deal with. You probably weren't asked to move tables. You were more likely asked to coordinate a venue for a wedding or something. The people assigned to you who were told they'd only have to move tables end up not finding them. Interrupting them is just as unacceptable because now they have to rush to home depot to buy them at the last minute and they're out of billable hours. They deliver the new tables and now you're the one moving them yourself.
Interruptions suck for everyone because there are always leaky abstractions and messy dependency trees. People incorrectly assume some details are trivial and factoring out the pain points is at least discouraged if not considered insubordination. Bad management and bad planning are everywhere.
nucleardog · 52m ago
> Interruptions suck for everyone because there are always leaky abstractions and messy dependency trees
I think the "dependency trees" is usually the most obvious killer. You're putting tables away... who made sure everyone's even out of the building? Who cleared the stuff off the tables?
Even ignoring that... Even if the job is just purely "move tables", I'd propose a simple thought experiment: We're operating a venue for events. Imagine a church basement. We have 75 tables and a large closet we keep them all in between events.
You can choose one of two people to clean up after an event:
Person A has put these tables away 176 times over that past year.
Person B has put these tables away 3 times over the past year.
(If you're not looking and going "yeah those two things look exactly equal", than intuitively I think you have some sense that even unskilled positions benefit from experience and skill.)
If I'm the venue owner and I'm paying hourly for cleanup, I'd put my full faith in Person A. It's not a "skilled" position or a "knowledge" job, but someone that has done it that many times has likely found the easiest and quickest way to get it done with minimal wasted time. When exceptions come up they know what to do or who to talk to. They've also realized that carrying a rag in their pocket and wiping the table before they put it away costs them 5% extra time now, but saves us overall a bunch of time because the event set up shift no longer needs to run around with paint scrapers to remove dried cheese from half the tables after fondue night.
I think, in general, the idea of "unskilled" labour should be applied more to "the barrier to entry" more than "the people that work in that labour". Many "unskilled labours" _can_ be done by someone with no skill. They are done _well_ by someone with a lot of experience and effort that I think make a lot of "knowledge jobs" look pathetic in comparison.
nucleardog · 1h ago
When I'm doing "physical labour" I find interruptions almost as impactful. (Though I'd accept that I'm the type to just overthink things.)
"Take this pile of stuff and pack it in that moving truck."
I mean, sure, I might just grab the nearest thing, carry it and set it in the first available spot and repeat... But usually I'm putting a little more into it than that. Unless the destination is comically oversized, I need to make sure I'm making good use of the space. Even just packing boxes, putting a 150lb plastic tub full of ammo on top of a bunch of boxes full of dishes is... probably not going to turn out well at the other end.
I started by doing a quick walk through and looking at labels to figure out roughly what I have to deal with. If the boxes are somewhat standard, I've probably found a pattern to how they best fit to minimize wasted space. I may have some piles I'm working on on the side that are "very heavy" or "very light" to try and at least roughly sort them into "heavy on the bottom light on top". That also lets me cut down the number of trips since the "very light" boxes can probably be carried two or three at a time. The boxes stack 6" short of the top of the truck, so I should probably put these bed frame boards aside and once I have solid base of boxes I can slide those right on top...
So I'm walking around with the context of a couple of temporary piles, a couple things to go once I have the right spot for them, the rough shape of the source pile, vaguely what the inside of the truck looks like and what I need next for each stack, the next couple moves to make, and more all floating around in my head. Losing that is not without consequence.
"Get all these pallets off of the loading dock and into the store."
They probably weren't put into the truck and then unloaded based on any sort of knowledge of the layout of the store at all. And each individual stack of pallets was stacked for the lower one supporting the upper one sufficiently to survive a semi ride across the continent. (If you have two pallets of TVs and two pallets of toilet paper, you don't make a stack of each.) I could just grab the next stack, set it down where the first pallet belongs, grab the one on top, drive that to where the next belongs...
Or I could see "Hey there's two stacks here with TVs on the bottom and toilet paper on top. Those are opposite corners of the store. Let me spend a few seconds on the loading dock to restack these, and cut my driving way down."
I _could_ take this one with that one I see back there... but that one way back there is deep into the pile, and I've got limited "scratch" space to drop stuff. In all likelihood, if I don't just take this one now and eat the drive across the store, it's going to just be in my way for the next hour. Screw it.
If someone pulls me on to something else for a bit and I lose all the context, the next few steps I have planned, why I put that pallet to the side for now, etc... yeah, I'm gonna come back and operate less efficiently.
(And if you're thinking "well yeah but you're clearly an insane person" or "that's just bringing a CS background to forklift driving"... I had and have no CS background, and while I picked this stuff up way more intuitively this was something the "lifers", who in some cases had literal brain damage, were teaching to the new guys.)
"Count these recyclables by type and write down the number on this paper."
Okay this one there's no real crazy context to hold in your head, but you definitely get into a flow where your brain is almost checked out besides your hands moving containers and your brain keeping tally marks.
While I _can_ do basic math, there were a number of slightly embarrassing incidents where I'd done things like looked at a paper where I'd written "100", "100", "12" and decided that added up to "112" because I was so deep into "put containers in fingers, put in correct bin, make tally mark" apparently the math part of my brain had fully turned off.
> Knowledge work is not the same as physical work.
I do disagree. I don't mean to give you any shit about it though. If I hadn't started in it when I was 14 years I have no doubt I'd be here emphatically agreeing with you.
I think the main difference between "knowledge work" and "labour" is basically where the floor is to get the job done.
Anyone can move boxes from A to B--a good mover can do it much faster, fit more things in less space and get it to the other end in one piece much better.
Anyone not a complete idiot could be shoved in a backhoe and dig a hole without tipping it over. An experienced operator can do shit that borders on magic. (I mean, go look up some YouTube videos.)
Anyone can grab a tub of drywall mud and a can of paint and patch and repaint a room. A good drywaller/painter can take your wavy wall full of holes and turn it into a piece of glass.
Anyone can glue two pipes together. A good plumber can look and get a picture of the entire plumbing _system_ the house and figure out how the gurgle in that drain means there's an air lock and the plumbing vent on your roof is blocked. Or figure out that the reason your reverse osmosis system's pump keeps cycling on and off is because the transformer supplying it power has failed. (Yeah, I had a plumber pull out a bench power supply to fix my water system...)
Anyone can drive a forklift around. Someone with a minimal amount of sense and training can do it safely. An experienced operator is trying their best to optimize for some sort of traveling salesman problem involving the locations being queued in multiple stacks on a 2D plane with imperfect knowledge.
Someone at the floor of these roles... yeah, they haven't put enough thought into it for an interruption to matter. But if you ever deal with a "really good" mover, equipment operator, tradesperson, or anything else... that shit makes a difference.
The difference between a knowledge worker and a labourer is that no one's asking their forklift driver making $35k/yr how to make their job more efficient. They're asking their MBA making $150k/yr and software engineer making $300k/yr to create a program to design software to give the driver a more efficient route.
RossBencina · 2h ago
A search for "Gloria Mark 23 minutes" is interesting reading.
At this point I would suggest going to the source, establish contact with Gloria Mark or a relevant student or co-author and ask whether Dr Mark can confirm that it is an accurate quote, and if so, whether it is a published result. One approach might be to develop the enquiry through a potentially sympathetic third person such as Cal Newport.
This is adjacent to the post but most (software) engineers I have interacted with are amazing plate spinners and an interruption is just another (ephemeral) plate to spin and it's not even close to 20 minutes recovery time.
Unless it's an emergency (boohoo it'll take whatever it takes) or it tickles my fancy more than what I'm doing - which is a me problem.
dgunay · 2h ago
When some of those plates are unnecessary, it causes problems. I may be responsible for 3 plates worth of work, and be capable of 6 on a really good day. On a bad day though, 3 may be all I can handle and an interruption=dropped plate.
ungreased0675 · 4h ago
I’m not finding it in a quick search, but I believe I’ve read something by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about the time needed to get into a flow state after being interrupted.
nashashmi · 4h ago
Someone yelling at me costs me 4 hours on a good day.
"When people did resume work on the same day, it took an
average length of time of 25 min. 26 sec (sd=54 min. 48
sec.). This may seem like a relatively short amount of time,
but it is also important to consider that before resuming work,
our informants worked in an average of 2.26 (sd=2.79)
working spheres. Thus, people’s attention was directed to
multiple other topics before resuming work. This was
reported by informants as being very detrimental. In some
cases, the physical or desktop environment is restructured,
which makes it more difficult to rely on cues to reorient one
to their interrupted task. For example, a blinking cursor at the
end of the last typed word can enable one to immediately
reorient to that document, whereas if other windows have
been opened, it can be hard to remember even which
document had been worked on."
And
"We found a trend that showed more externally interrupted
working spheres are resumed on the same day (53.3%)
compared to internally interrupted working spheres (47.6%),
X2
(1)=2.97, p<.09. Externally interrupted working spheres are
resumed on the average in a shorter time (22 min. 37 sec.,
sd=53 min. 52 sec.) than internally interrupted working
spheres, (29 min. 1 sec., sd=55 min. 43 sec.), t(987)=1.92,
p<.055."
So no, it does not say 23 minutes and 15 seconds in that paper.
But to say: "the paper never goes into details regarding the recovery time between finishing the interruption and getting back to the original task." is flat out incomplete, because they are reading the followup paper to the original work in isolation; and haven't considered that a number of reports summarized the findings of that (22 m 37s) as "about 23 minutes".
The way it is written implies the research is all wrong, rather than more accurately stating "I can't find the exact source of a quote but it's broadly 22-23 minutes, not 23m15s afaict".
There is also some irony in "ctrl+f", "23" being explained as the methodology for review on the topic of attention span for complex tasks...
godelski · 3h ago
> The way it is written implies the research is all wrong
I think you read the words from the article but I think you missed their entire point. I think you're actually demonstrating their thesis...
Other days an interruption costs me pretty much nothing.
I’m still trying to figure out how to tell which of those days I’m going to have and whether to just not log into Slack for the day.
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[0] That's the gaming PC I play StarCraft 2 on and I found it simpler to always leave it in one mode than switching back and forth.
It felt horrendously unproductive to have two people at one keyboard but we compared commit rates and the surprising result was that we produced the same rate of changes as working separately.
I don't feel less intelligent, maybe more experience compensates for it. I probably make less wrong turns. But I have to be more rigid to prevent interruptions.
If I don't have tests available, I always need to re-read so much code that it feels like having to start all over again to be able to get a mental picture of the complexity.
I started to love Go for that very reason, because I always have my state written down in the form of unit tests while I am implementing it. This removes so much burden of thought after I got interrupted, because all edge cases I can write down and I don't have to actively try to remember them. Go made me fall in love with Test Driven Development, again.
Of course at times it’s just better to admit altogether this isn’t a day meant for work and spend it relaxing instead. Usually, the benefit of that is a really productive day at work the day after too, everybody wins.
I’ve thought about this for years as I tune my work life balance. I’ve never felt like I’m wrongly bringing work home with me that way. It’s always felt like an incredible optimization where my job gives me these puzzles I get to carry with me and work on when I’m bored or my ADHD addled brain screams for stimulation.
My basic rule on all science is go at least look at the papers abstract, method and their graphs/data. In 5 minutes you'll be better informed than the pop science article and it gets easier the more you read them.
Interruption do impact getting back in but I find it very variable, I actually if I am doing very strict TDD I recover from interruptions well. If I am busy thinking about a design or doing some more complex algorithm performance analysis its all happening in my head and they take longer. I think it is measurable and you could set up experiments to see how long it took to start producing again and if there is a slow start or not on a well defined programming task.
I wonder if perhaps a part of LLM hallucinations can be explained by them being provided such reporting and having it (mistakenly) tagged as high-quality training data.
Probably (haha) far more of a function of temperature than training data. If the corpus is large enough for your prompt and you turn the temperature all the way down, you will get almost no hallucinations. You then have what is essentially a search engine.
1) it certainly contributes to a significant part of the g̶r̶o̶w̶i̶n̶g̶ distrust in science. People are getting their science from the news, not the horse's mouth. If you report something silly while saying "scientists say" then people will point the finger at the scientists more than they will point to the reporter. The scientists aren't writing in plain English after all[0]. Things like chocolate being healthy for you, red meat causing cancer, or machine learning quantum blackholes. There's always elements of truth to these things but truth is not sensational. Truth and complexity go hand in hand. As complexity decreases you will have to sacrifice accuracy. This is a tough balance to play[1].
2) The public isn't very scientifically literate and it is easy to misconstrue meaning. Hell, even scientists routinely struggle with this stuff. Let's take the red meat issue as an example. It's true, but a lot of those studies were looking at daily intake of 50g or 100g and results like "25% higher risk of rectal cancer" at the higher end of the estimates. For context, a Costco hotdog is 110g while a Nathan's Hotdog is 48. We're talking about 1-2 hotdogs per day. We're also talking about a percent increase in risk, not a percent risk. The CDC site says approximately 3.9% of men and women will be diagnosed with colorectal cancer. If that's our baseline then a 25% increase is a 4.9% risk. That's a disgusting amount of hotdogs to move from a 4% cancer risk to a 5%. Concerning on a national level but not on a personal. This feeds back to #1 as people are interpreting the news as saying "eating hotdogs makes you likely to get cancer" while people observe heavy hotdog eaters around them not getting cancer. Their observation wouldn't run counter to what the research says but it will against the narrative on the news. The incongruence between observation and understanding does justify mistrust. But there's just more ways to misinterpret something than there are to interpret correctly (relates to [2]). This failure mode becomes self-reinforcing. Enough that I think anyone that spends any time on the internet will be aware of it. (Communicating is fucking hard, communicating accurately is even harder)
3) (Perhaps the worst part) Scientists are primarily measured by their citations (count or "h-index"[3]). Unless you do something groundbreaking[4] (which is rare) then this is the main way to "measure" performance. A great way to boost citations is getting media attention. Unfortunately there's just a lot of papers published and a primary driver of citation count is knowledge of a paper's existence. You don't need to be an Avi Loeb type (it doesn't hurt) when we're talking about small numbers. If a Cal State grad student and a MIT grad student were to publish the same paper we'd expect the latter to have more citations due to the latter's greater visibility. MIT has a media wing and these papers are much more easily picked up by larger news orgs. This is why so many scientists use platforms like Twitter. Because your work doesn't mean anything (to your personal success and ability to continue doing your work) if you can't get enough citations. There's an obvious slippery slope here... One that can create a feedback loop to misreporting. The fiercer the competition the the more risky this situation becomes. It's really easy to do slight embellishments of your work. No one is checking at time of publication. Replication happens later and the system devalues replication. Plus, while replicating it is much easier to assume you've made a mistake rather than the paper was in error (or in serious error).
All this is to say that shit is messy. And I don't think any of it is particularly any one person's fault. More an emergent phenomena through compounding effects. Little things here and there add up as we talk about millions of events and many years. I know we all want things to be simple, and simplicity has a lot of benefits, but it also can be a big trap. "As simple as possible, but no simpler" does not mean something isn't extremely complex[5]. It's a trap that makes people think they can read a few lines from Wikipedia and understand something (read the whole article, it's still not enough). A trap with growing consequences to a world that grows in complexity[6]
[0] And I don't think w̶e̶ they should. Papers are a peer-to-peer communication network. Open and visible, but that's how the peer-to-peer communication takes place. Expert-to-public communication has traditionally been done through news or other science communicators. Asking scientists to write papers to the general public is like asking you to communicate to your coworker about your code as if your coworker knows nothing about code or the context it is running in (all because a layman may overhear). Good luck getting any work done...
[1] While news orgs and science communicators (especially pop sci communicators... ugh...) are doing harm here there are defenses anyone can take. Recognize your understanding is always wrong to some degree. Don't take in information as binary true/false statements but probabilities: e.g. likely true/maybe true/maybe false/likely false. Fundamentally the reason this is a good defense is because it is always a more accurate interpretation. Scientists don't find truth through confirmation but through negation. What I mean is w̶e̶ they rule things out. A scientist converges to truth[2]
[2] This also helps you sniff out conmen from the scientists. The scientist always has some doubt. At first they may show themselves as highly confident but as you press on detail they start weakening language. This isn't foolproof and isn't gonna work for every question, but it is common. Scientists are being more trained on media literacy because there is recognition that while this is the right way to talk to peers it gives the public a sense that they lack expertise rather than are aware of complexity. The best signal is just getting them to talk about their domain. They won't stop and will get very detailed.
[3] Number of papers with greater than N citations. An h-index of 10 is having 10 papers with >= 10 citations. h-index of 100 is 100 papers with >= 100 citations.
[4] If you do something groundbreaking no one gives a shit about citation count. But doing something groundbreaking will surely make your citation count skyrocket (often it also drives your h-index too, as you've simply gained more attention and more people are reading your other works. Your work doesn't change, but visibility does). This fact is often used to justify the usage of citation metrics. Citation metrics are fine, but they're also easy to hack and highly context driven. I mention Avi Loeb, and controversy is beneficial to this metric. Every paper that cites him to say he's wrong is a point for him. Controversy is a way to gather points from a whole new source! Not those building on your work, but those building against your work.
[5] "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough" is laughable phrase. The reason you can't teach "a barmaid" Quantum Chromodynamics isn't because you don't understand it. You can't explain it "simply" because you don't understand it. You can't explain it simply because you can't even use the word "color" without a layman thinking a quark is red (can you even get into how it is impossible to have "red" at that scale?).
[6] Progress necessitates an increase in complexity. Look at a Taylor Expansion and it's relationship to computational difficulty. I'll let you all figure this out, my comment is already too long.
> GMJ: How long does it take to get back to work after an interruption?
> Mark: There's good news and bad news. To have a uniform comparison, we looked at all work that was interrupted and resumed on the same day. The good news is that most interrupted work was resumed on the same day -- 81.9 percent -- and it was resumed, on average, in 23 minutes and 15 seconds, which I guess is not so long.
> But the bad news is, when you're interrupted, you don't immediately go back to the task you were doing before you were interrupted. There are about two intervening tasks before you go back to your original task, so it takes more effort to reorient back to the original task. Also, interruptions change the physical environment. For example, someone has asked you for information and you have opened new windows on your desktop, or people have given you papers that are now arranged on your desk. So often the physical layout of your environment has changed, and it's harder to reconstruct where you were. So there's a cognitive cost to an interruption.
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Interesting because it is an active demonstration of their entire point.
Knowledge work is not the same as physical work. Both are noble in my opinion, but not the same.
Physical work does require some concentration as well, but imagine on top of that having to take off all your gear and walk into some makeshift office on site, deal with whatever bullshit they're bugging you about, and then go back out to your spot and get ready all over again.
Interruptions for any reason other than a true emergency is just poor planning caused by bad management.
Caterers and guests are coming. More interruptions in the form of calls, texts, and emails don't stop and each is also "just 10 seconds".
I think it's pretty rare to find jobs where your role is so clearly defined that all you have to do is move tables. Most work asks that you solve a high level problem nobody else wants to deal with. You probably weren't asked to move tables. You were more likely asked to coordinate a venue for a wedding or something. The people assigned to you who were told they'd only have to move tables end up not finding them. Interrupting them is just as unacceptable because now they have to rush to home depot to buy them at the last minute and they're out of billable hours. They deliver the new tables and now you're the one moving them yourself.
Interruptions suck for everyone because there are always leaky abstractions and messy dependency trees. People incorrectly assume some details are trivial and factoring out the pain points is at least discouraged if not considered insubordination. Bad management and bad planning are everywhere.
I think the "dependency trees" is usually the most obvious killer. You're putting tables away... who made sure everyone's even out of the building? Who cleared the stuff off the tables?
Even ignoring that... Even if the job is just purely "move tables", I'd propose a simple thought experiment: We're operating a venue for events. Imagine a church basement. We have 75 tables and a large closet we keep them all in between events.
You can choose one of two people to clean up after an event:
Person A has put these tables away 176 times over that past year.
Person B has put these tables away 3 times over the past year.
(If you're not looking and going "yeah those two things look exactly equal", than intuitively I think you have some sense that even unskilled positions benefit from experience and skill.)
If I'm the venue owner and I'm paying hourly for cleanup, I'd put my full faith in Person A. It's not a "skilled" position or a "knowledge" job, but someone that has done it that many times has likely found the easiest and quickest way to get it done with minimal wasted time. When exceptions come up they know what to do or who to talk to. They've also realized that carrying a rag in their pocket and wiping the table before they put it away costs them 5% extra time now, but saves us overall a bunch of time because the event set up shift no longer needs to run around with paint scrapers to remove dried cheese from half the tables after fondue night.
I think, in general, the idea of "unskilled" labour should be applied more to "the barrier to entry" more than "the people that work in that labour". Many "unskilled labours" _can_ be done by someone with no skill. They are done _well_ by someone with a lot of experience and effort that I think make a lot of "knowledge jobs" look pathetic in comparison.
"Take this pile of stuff and pack it in that moving truck."
I mean, sure, I might just grab the nearest thing, carry it and set it in the first available spot and repeat... But usually I'm putting a little more into it than that. Unless the destination is comically oversized, I need to make sure I'm making good use of the space. Even just packing boxes, putting a 150lb plastic tub full of ammo on top of a bunch of boxes full of dishes is... probably not going to turn out well at the other end.
I started by doing a quick walk through and looking at labels to figure out roughly what I have to deal with. If the boxes are somewhat standard, I've probably found a pattern to how they best fit to minimize wasted space. I may have some piles I'm working on on the side that are "very heavy" or "very light" to try and at least roughly sort them into "heavy on the bottom light on top". That also lets me cut down the number of trips since the "very light" boxes can probably be carried two or three at a time. The boxes stack 6" short of the top of the truck, so I should probably put these bed frame boards aside and once I have solid base of boxes I can slide those right on top...
So I'm walking around with the context of a couple of temporary piles, a couple things to go once I have the right spot for them, the rough shape of the source pile, vaguely what the inside of the truck looks like and what I need next for each stack, the next couple moves to make, and more all floating around in my head. Losing that is not without consequence.
"Get all these pallets off of the loading dock and into the store."
They probably weren't put into the truck and then unloaded based on any sort of knowledge of the layout of the store at all. And each individual stack of pallets was stacked for the lower one supporting the upper one sufficiently to survive a semi ride across the continent. (If you have two pallets of TVs and two pallets of toilet paper, you don't make a stack of each.) I could just grab the next stack, set it down where the first pallet belongs, grab the one on top, drive that to where the next belongs...
Or I could see "Hey there's two stacks here with TVs on the bottom and toilet paper on top. Those are opposite corners of the store. Let me spend a few seconds on the loading dock to restack these, and cut my driving way down."
I _could_ take this one with that one I see back there... but that one way back there is deep into the pile, and I've got limited "scratch" space to drop stuff. In all likelihood, if I don't just take this one now and eat the drive across the store, it's going to just be in my way for the next hour. Screw it.
If someone pulls me on to something else for a bit and I lose all the context, the next few steps I have planned, why I put that pallet to the side for now, etc... yeah, I'm gonna come back and operate less efficiently.
(And if you're thinking "well yeah but you're clearly an insane person" or "that's just bringing a CS background to forklift driving"... I had and have no CS background, and while I picked this stuff up way more intuitively this was something the "lifers", who in some cases had literal brain damage, were teaching to the new guys.)
"Count these recyclables by type and write down the number on this paper."
Okay this one there's no real crazy context to hold in your head, but you definitely get into a flow where your brain is almost checked out besides your hands moving containers and your brain keeping tally marks.
While I _can_ do basic math, there were a number of slightly embarrassing incidents where I'd done things like looked at a paper where I'd written "100", "100", "12" and decided that added up to "112" because I was so deep into "put containers in fingers, put in correct bin, make tally mark" apparently the math part of my brain had fully turned off.
> Knowledge work is not the same as physical work.
I do disagree. I don't mean to give you any shit about it though. If I hadn't started in it when I was 14 years I have no doubt I'd be here emphatically agreeing with you.
I think the main difference between "knowledge work" and "labour" is basically where the floor is to get the job done.
Anyone can move boxes from A to B--a good mover can do it much faster, fit more things in less space and get it to the other end in one piece much better.
Anyone not a complete idiot could be shoved in a backhoe and dig a hole without tipping it over. An experienced operator can do shit that borders on magic. (I mean, go look up some YouTube videos.)
Anyone can grab a tub of drywall mud and a can of paint and patch and repaint a room. A good drywaller/painter can take your wavy wall full of holes and turn it into a piece of glass.
Anyone can glue two pipes together. A good plumber can look and get a picture of the entire plumbing _system_ the house and figure out how the gurgle in that drain means there's an air lock and the plumbing vent on your roof is blocked. Or figure out that the reason your reverse osmosis system's pump keeps cycling on and off is because the transformer supplying it power has failed. (Yeah, I had a plumber pull out a bench power supply to fix my water system...)
Anyone can drive a forklift around. Someone with a minimal amount of sense and training can do it safely. An experienced operator is trying their best to optimize for some sort of traveling salesman problem involving the locations being queued in multiple stacks on a 2D plane with imperfect knowledge.
Someone at the floor of these roles... yeah, they haven't put enough thought into it for an interruption to matter. But if you ever deal with a "really good" mover, equipment operator, tradesperson, or anything else... that shit makes a difference.
The difference between a knowledge worker and a labourer is that no one's asking their forklift driver making $35k/yr how to make their job more efficient. They're asking their MBA making $150k/yr and software engineer making $300k/yr to create a program to design software to give the driver a more efficient route.
At this point I would suggest going to the source, establish contact with Gloria Mark or a relevant student or co-author and ask whether Dr Mark can confirm that it is an accurate quote, and if so, whether it is a published result. One approach might be to develop the enquiry through a potentially sympathetic third person such as Cal Newport.
Gloria Mark said it in an interview in 2006.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_Rare_in_Patients_Tre...
Unless it's an emergency (boohoo it'll take whatever it takes) or it tickles my fancy more than what I'm doing - which is a me problem.
"When people did resume work on the same day, it took an average length of time of 25 min. 26 sec (sd=54 min. 48 sec.). This may seem like a relatively short amount of time, but it is also important to consider that before resuming work, our informants worked in an average of 2.26 (sd=2.79) working spheres. Thus, people’s attention was directed to multiple other topics before resuming work. This was reported by informants as being very detrimental. In some cases, the physical or desktop environment is restructured, which makes it more difficult to rely on cues to reorient one to their interrupted task. For example, a blinking cursor at the end of the last typed word can enable one to immediately reorient to that document, whereas if other windows have been opened, it can be hard to remember even which document had been worked on."
And "We found a trend that showed more externally interrupted working spheres are resumed on the same day (53.3%) compared to internally interrupted working spheres (47.6%), X2 (1)=2.97, p<.09. Externally interrupted working spheres are resumed on the average in a shorter time (22 min. 37 sec., sd=53 min. 52 sec.) than internally interrupted working spheres, (29 min. 1 sec., sd=55 min. 43 sec.), t(987)=1.92, p<.055."
So no, it does not say 23 minutes and 15 seconds in that paper.
But to say: "the paper never goes into details regarding the recovery time between finishing the interruption and getting back to the original task." is flat out incomplete, because they are reading the followup paper to the original work in isolation; and haven't considered that a number of reports summarized the findings of that (22 m 37s) as "about 23 minutes". The way it is written implies the research is all wrong, rather than more accurately stating "I can't find the exact source of a quote but it's broadly 22-23 minutes, not 23m15s afaict".
There is also some irony in "ctrl+f", "23" being explained as the methodology for review on the topic of attention span for complex tasks...