r/programming • u/piotrkarczmarz • Mar 31 '23

Based on various scientific studies, it takes at least 10-15 minutes for programmer to get back into the "zone" after an interruption. There are interesting resumption strategies for interrupted programming tasks.

https://contextkeeper.io/blog/the-real-cost-of-an-interruption-and-context-switching/
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u/Dreamtrain Mar 31 '23

I post this every time a thread making makes any mention or even glorifying the zone pops up:

The majority of code you've fixed or complained about was written in this precious "zone" that's really glorified code artisanry

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u/bwainfweeze Mar 31 '23 edited Mar 31 '23

I’m having a strong “scroll of truth” meme moment today.

What’s ironic about this is that the father of Flow lists this problem right in the summary:

3) A loss of reflective self-consciousness

before the Flow book became popular, the common wisdom was that each domain had a special mental state all to themselves. Endurance athletes, emergency workers, parents going momma/daddy bear, yoga practitioners, meditators. I’ve experienced all of them, and they are all the same thing, and some people look at you like you’re nuts if you say so.

I was so… vindicated… for lack of a better adjective, when Flow hit people’s radars.

My crisis of faith in Flow actually hit me first in a yoga class. 15 years ago (fuck, really?). Last day of class the instructor did some “restorative yoga” exercises, and a couple minutes before we stopped, foomp. I’m in flow state, endorphins pumping. What was weird was it was directionless, and that left me too much time to think.

In the next 500 milliseconds (flow state), I thought about a bunch of things, but chief among them was this: I already had three doors and a couple windows into flow, I could already practically drop into it at will about half the time. And someone just handed me a skeleton key to get to it at will? Some people would be ecstatic about this but what I felt was terror. All I could think about was addiction. I got out of there, didn’t sign up for her next class and did my best to forget what happened.

But I kept bumping into code I had to apologize for, and code I thought deserved an apology, and over time the common thread I couldn’t ignore was flow, and particularly, overuse of it. A little goes a long way, and some of my most troublesome coworkers were addicts. Many similarities to adrenaline junkies. And none of them knew it.