Interruptions

Lately I've been writing, writing and correcting.  I'm at 79K words and I'm about to crack 150 pages.  It's tedious and so I have not felt like doing any other form of writing such as this blog. Therefore, for this entry, I will mainly refer to other's work.

The other day, The Joel Test came up in conversation, so I looked it up.  The infamous Joel Spolsky wrote about 12 checks for a software development team.  I've always been interested in interruptions and how they affect one's productivity (such as stopping to write a blog article), so when I saw items 2 and 8 in the joel test I found it interesting.  I've long known that a 30 second interruption can cost you 15 minutes of productivity, Joel however cites this as the minimum loss of productivity.  He also links this phenomenon to working memory.

Working memory is the set of things your thinking of right now.  If you want a computer analogy think of the registers in a CPU, (RAM being short term memory and disk being long term memory).  Most people can remember roughly 7 plus-or-minus 2 things (if I remember correctly).  When you're interrupted you forget everything out of your working memory so that you can help your colleague with his spelling, even though it only takes you 30 seconds to remember how to spell something, you spend the next 15 minutes trying to get back into the zone.  Had your colleague used a dictionary it would have cost him a little more time, and would not have cost you that 15 minute minimum.

I was talking with a friend about this, he suggested that the problem is not just working memory, but that it also applies to any creative work.  He said that humans seem to need 8 minutes of rest before they can be creative.  however, we do not have a citation for this statement and my friend isn't sure if he recalls it correctly.  We did find another interesting article on the topic of thinking time and reflection.

On a related note I found another article from Joel on a similar topic of 'context switching'.  Here he discusses that switching between multiple tasks can also be a problem for efficiencly.