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I woke up yesterday and couldn't even take an inventory on
myself. Five days of travel had wasted my mind and all I had
left were some vague ideas of what I should/could be doing.
But yet, couldn't start the steps that would eventually lead in that
direction. It's a tough feeling to realize, at the start of
the day, that your day will be entirely wasted and unproductive.
I partook of some simple comfort activities... like cooking
comfort food, picking up business cards & reading all the
blogs I subscribe to. Fortunately, one of those blogs
lead to some articles that at least stimulated my mind and the day
wasn't a total waste. Most significant of my meanderings
through the web were two articles that completely described how I
felt.
The 'Human Task Switch' article hit home pretty hard. Last
week I had some serious forward momentum. Then I went on
vacation to participate in Oozefest. All that energy was
diverted and lost. All creative ideas not written down have
been lost forever, or at least until I can get rolling again.
The 'Fire and Motion' article came blazing in with why last week
felt so good. It was forward motion. It was return
fire. It was a brick wall to hide behind and buy some
time.
So the day was written off, and today... well it's been
better. But it won't be much more than getting my workspace
back into a working condition. I'll probably throw some creme
and butter on the website, and do some chasing of customers... But
imagine if I hadn't oozed.
Continuing my rant... I'm not looking forward to Mom coming home
tomorrow nite. (Although the effect will be minimized because
she'll work on thursday and friday.) The following article
excerpt illustrates why.
Where
do These People Get Their (Unoriginal) Ideas?
By
Joel Spolsky
Wednesday, April 19, 2000
Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little
details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption
can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume
work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable
names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that
search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up,
which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed.
Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to
suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute,
we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this
example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles
next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt
can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy
function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could
ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to
Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of
productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).
Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors.
Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could
look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff,
which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy
task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he
looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we
save 15 minutes for Jeff.
In a perfect world, shutting the door would deter Mom
from interupting to ask how add a contact to her outlook
address book or for me to read the card with all the passwords
for her because she printed it too small to read with out her
glasses. AIEEEEE! So when I return to what I was
doing... getting started again can be harder than say, watching tv
or browsing through Fark photoshop contests.
At the top of this uphill battle is a plateau. And life
there will be good. Mostly because I'll be making enough money
to live on my own and concentrate on the activities which are
important to me, or bring in money. Until then...
Check out Joel
on Software Archives. Even if you're not computer
literate, there are lots of gems of information applicaple to
something important to you. (Provided you have a strong enough
imagination to adapt his thoughts to your intents.)
Posted by BG on 4/28/04; 11:36:19
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