by Serguey Shinder
I counted for three days because I had been complaining. Twenty three interruptions on the Wednesday, which felt about right and confirmed everything I believed about open plan offices. Then I looked at the tally properly. Nine of them came from other people. Fourteen were me.
Nobody had spoken to me. I had simply gone somewhere else, and I had gone almost every time without noticing that I had decided to.
The useful part was not the count but a habit I picked up alongside it, which was writing down the last thing I had been doing before each one. After three days the pattern was not subtle. I left when the work got hard. Not when it got boring, which is what I would have guessed and what I had been telling people. Within about a minute of arriving at something I did not know how to do, I was elsewhere. A stack trace I could not immediately read. A function whose behaviour I would have had to follow through three files to be certain of. A question about whether a change was safe, which I could only answer by going and checking, and checking is work.
At that precise moment the messages are lovely. They are legible, they are finite, somebody else has written them in sentences, and not one of them requires me to sit inside not knowing something. The pull is not towards distraction. It is away from the particular discomfort of being stuck, and stuck is where the work I am paid for actually happens.
What I do now is one sentence in a notebook and it has worked better than any blocking software I ever installed. When I catch myself reaching, I write down what I am stuck on, in words, before I go. Half the time writing the sentence is enough, because the sentence turns out to be answerable and I have just written down the next thing to do. The other half I go anyway, but I come back to a note telling me what I was in the middle of, instead of to a screen I no longer recognise.
I also stopped keeping the messages one keystroke away in the afternoon, not because they are wicked but because the reach has to cost something. If it takes four seconds it will happen fourteen times.
What I would say to anybody convinced their concentration is being destroyed by other people is to count for a week, honestly, and see who is doing it. Mine was mostly me, and I had been telling a story about the office for years. The interruptions I could blame on somebody else were the smaller half. The larger half was a small flinch away from difficulty, repeated all day, which I had never once caught myself in the act of.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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