On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 4:21 PM, Kathleen Murtagh <kathleen@ceardach.com> wrote:
In terms of time management, I've been thinking a lot about this issue :) It comes down to patterns, motivation and task switching.
Exactly. And tooling. The world of software development has been standardizing and optimizing the email client for more years and far more man-years than the "test patch files against CVS" environment.
Then is task switching. I know this one well :) Although the actual
6 totally wasted hours due to overhead. I am, obviously, an extreme example of this phenomena. However, a "20 minute" patch review can
Kathleen Murtagh
No, you're not an extreme case. You're just far more observant and informed about the issue than most. In their classic book Peopleware , Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister report on studies of programmers' productivity relative to the characteristics of their work environment. "It is clear that interruptions are a major cause of low productivity among programmers. Why? The problem is not the time needed to handle the interruptions themselves, but the time needed to get back into the programming problem. Everybody, no matter what they do, face a reorientation time when they return to their work after an interruption. When you are reading a magazine article and look up to answer a question, it takes you longer to read the next paragraph than if you had been reading continuously." -- from this article: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/it-nielsen4/?dwzone=ibm