The meeting starts in two minutes.
You are deep in something.
Three files open,
a theory half formed,
one hand on the answer.
You close the laptop
and walk away.
When you come back,
you are not where you left.
You are at the trailhead again,
reading your own code
like a stranger,
trying to remember
why you opened that file,
what you had ruled out,
what the next step was
supposed to be.
Twenty minutes to climb back
to where you already stood.
That climb is the real cost
of interruption.
Not the meeting.
The re-entry.
And the strange thing is
that you can pay almost none of it
for the price of forty seconds.
Before you stand up,
write the note.
Three lines at the bottom
of the file you are in,
or in a scratch pad
that never leaves your screen.
What am I doing.
What have I ruled out.
What is the very next move.
Not a status report.
A rope back into the cave.
Working on the null case
in the parser.
Ruled out the config,
it is the tokenizer.
Next, add a failing test
for an empty input line.
That is it.
Come back after the meeting,
read four lines,
and you are inside the problem
in a minute
instead of half an hour.
Do it at the end of the day too,
which is the interruption
you schedule on purpose.
Never stop at a clean finish
if you can help it.
Stop mid sentence,
with a note,
and tomorrow morning
you will not spend your best hour
deciding what to do.
You will already be moving
while the coffee is hot.
There is a second gift here.
Writing the next move down
forces you to know
what the next move is.
Half the time you will discover
you did not know,
and that discovery,
at forty seconds,
is much cheaper
than discovering it
after another hour
of confident wandering.
You cannot stop
being interrupted.
You can stop paying
full price for it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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