I’m a card carrying medicated ADHD adult. I have this printed and on my door at work. Yesterday at one point I had a queue of people at my office door. The irony of why I didn’t get a lot done yesterday was lost on most people.
Context Switching
It’s why I hate when middle managers get a hold of my time allocation. “You have 8 hours a day, so you can spend 1 hour each on these 8 different projects and move them all forward together!” Sprinkle 3-4 pointless meetings throughout the day, and then they wonder why nothing gets done.
I wrote a reply before I got this far down in this thread, but 100% agree.
So for that hour:
10min to stop the last thing I was doing.
10 min to switch to new task (getting environment set up, checking out code, etc).
30 min to figure out where I was the last time I started.
And now 10 min to actually do anything.
God forbid a random pop-in, priority email, slack message, system alert, etc happen in that hour.
Yep seems totally efficient to me.
I’d like to point out that this doesn’t just apply to programmers. Other people need to think and concentrate for their jobs too.
Was anybody saying different?
This is every dang day of my life!
need to get on ADHD meds.
You need to CTRL+S whenever you do something
I’m an old comp sci grad. There was a concept we learned in my operating systems class called a context switch.
So basically, a context switch is when an operating system pauses one running process or thread, saves its state, and loads the saved state of another so the CPU can execute it. This makes multitasking possible by letting multiple processes share a single CPU while each later resumes exactly where it left off.
I would kill for this feature in real life.
This comic was done better by Jason Heeris back in 2013. Only reason I know this is because I printed it out and stuck it on my cubicle wall.
