The Doorway Effect and Developer Experience: Why It Matters

Even the most self-disciplined people are at risk from too many distractions. How GitHub Copilot Extensions can help.

Your brain clears out short-term memory when you move from place to place, especially if you get distracted on your way there. It turns out, this translates to the virtual world, where distractions are an ever-present danger.

 What Is the Doorway Effect?

You’re about to leave your house, and you check your pocket for your keys. You don’t want to lock yourself out. They aren’t in your pocket, so you need to go find them. You head into your front room and they aren’t there, so you go and check in the kitchen. The first thing you see when you get to the kitchen is that someone left the milk out. That’s annoying, but it’s still cold, so you put it back in the fridge.

And then it happens. That thing where you stand in the middle of the room wondering why you came in there.

That’s the doorway effect.

We often humorously attribute this to getting older, but it’s common to all age groups. Our brains attach information to context, and location turns out to be a big part of that. When we leave a room, those things in our short-term memory get downgraded so we can move our attention to other things. If something distracts us, it’s gone.

You don’t need to be a psychologist, understand episodic memory or experiment on college students to know it’s true. Everyone has had a doorway moment.

 Virtual Doorways

The doorway effect translates very well to the virtual world of windows, tabs and perpetual distraction. When you need to switch from your code editor to your web browser to complete a task, you might land on your email tab or a social network. If these tabs distract you, much of the mental model you’ve been building while you code is at risk of being lost.

Just as with intentional context switching, where you pause work to deal with an interruption, these micro-distractions often come with a recovery time. That means you lose some or all productivity for as much as twenty minutes and have to to repeat the cognitive work to get back into a flow state.

This is why the doorway effect is such a critical theory for developer experience (DevEx). Having solid blocks of time without interruptions allows us to get into a flow state, which is when we do our best work. You can design your tools to remove interruptions during this time, such as muting notifications. But you’re still at risk from the doorway effect.

Here’s a common example — and one of the most dangerous: Your computer is set to focus mode, so you’ve prevented interruptions. You start work and get deep into thinking through your work. Then you perform an operation that triggers a two-factor authentication step.

You pick up your phone to get the auth code and find the screen filled with social notifications, messages and a notification that a security update has been downloaded. Do you want to restart now?

After putting all this virtual milk back in the fridge, you’ve probably forgotten that you picked up your phone to get a two-factor authentication code — let alone the finer details of what you were doing before you had to authenticate.

 The Problem Is Distractions

There is strong evidence that switching tabs or windows isn’t the problem — it’s the distractions. If you could move between virtual spaces without hitting a speed bump along the way, you’d complete the task and smoothly return to whatever you were doing.

The reality is that it’s practically impossible to avoid a distraction once your focus moves from within a single application. When you’re working inside a code editor, you’re less likely to notice that red notification bubble on Slack or that your unread emails have increased by a factor of 10. Once you switch, you mentally zoom out, and the firehose of attention-grabbing toaster messages and bouncing apps leaps out at you like a virtual predatory animal (which is one theory about why our brains work like they do).

It’s not that moving from our code editor to another window is the problem; it’s because we can’t get to the other window without battling through all the noise.

The Copilot Solution

This is where solutions like GitHub Copilot are helping. The value lies not so much in the large language models and natural chat interfaces, but in their ability to let us complete a task without leaving our code editor, so we don’t have to dodge distractions.

We often need to look up language and API-specific information while coding. This is like running the gauntlet of distractions:

1. Switch to your web browser.
2. Try to ignore task bars and app icons with notifications.
3. Try to ignore the current active tab.
4. Enter your search.
5. Try to ignore ads.
6. Open the Q&A site with the answer.
7. Someone has commented on an old answer you wrote.
8. Fail!

With GitHub Copilot, you can find answers with the chat interface within the code editor. That means 100% fewer distractions, so you stay in the flow, feel more productive and experience less friction.

In May, GitHub Copilot Extensions were launched, with 14 extensions, such as Docker, MongoDB, Octopus Deploy and LambdaTest. This means more tasks can be completed without running the distraction gauntlet. As more extensions are added, there will be fewer reasons to leave your code editor and a greater chance of staying in the flow.

 We Want Focus Time

DevEx depends on focus time and, ultimately, it’s the only way significant work gets done. We’ve reached distraction saturation, so even the most self-disciplined people are at risk from the doorway effect. Getting things done is a crucial part of job satisfaction, and satisfied employees create stronger companies.