6 ms·

I would say "creative" workers instead of "knowledge" workers. If your job is to regurgitate a bunch of stuff from memory, interruptions might not be a big dea

I would say "creative" workers instead of "knowledge" workers. If your job is to regurgitate a bunch of stuff from memory, interruptions might not be a big deal. If your job is to create new things that don’t exist yet, then interruptions derail you as you need intense clarity and focus to do so. And it affects everyone who is in a creative class job equally when they are in a creative mode: Designers, architects, musicians, writers, engineers, chefs, mathematicians, scientists, etc. I like to think of it like this: A musician can play for a busy stadium, or a chef can cook for a busy restaurant, if they are playing a song they rehearsed or preparing a dish they made many times. But to write that song or create that dish in the first place, like hell you could do that with all that noise and distraction.

ebbv 8y ago
100%. This is what people fail to realize about programming. Sometimes our job is just writing stuff where we already know what we need to do. That stuff tends to go pretty fast. The hard part of our job, and what takes the majority of my time, is creating solutions to problems. And a lot of that time doesn’t even involve typing. I have to look through documentation, other people’s code, logs. And just think. The typing starts when I have an idea to try out. Interrupting that process is like detailing any other creative process. The problem is not the time I have to take to answer a question, it’s the time it will take to get back into the headspace the interruption took me out of.
- deleted 8y ago
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- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  That is why I love pencil and paper. As I'm going through code I take notes. As I read doc I take notes. As I'm thinking I take notes. If I do get interrupted it's relatively easy to pick back up because I have all these notes. By the time I'm coding I'm almost always following a mostly fleshed out algorithm so it goes pretty quick.
astrodust 8y ago
Maybe you've boiled it down to "creating" versus "performing", where performances are done by reflex, by habit, by routine, while the creation process takes considerably more attention.
- PrunJuice 8y ago
  Reminds me of social facilitation theory. In particular "habitual" responses being improved by having an audience and non-habitual responses being hindered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_facilitation#Attention_approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_facilitation#Attention_...
deleted 8y ago
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icebraining 8y ago
I'm not sure. The thing with the musician is that they're not really being interrupted. Sure, there's lights and movement and such, but that's more similar to the background noise we get in an open space environment, which many of us manage to filter out. When they are really interrupted, they are often pissed off too.
egypturnash 8y ago
So, here's my experience in another creative process. I'm an artist. The vast majority of my thinking and planning time happens with a sketchbook or drawing program open in front of me, and me rapidly generating rough sketches and/or story notes. I have learnt over the years that, sure, I can sit there staring off into space trying to work stuff out in my mind's eye all I like, but things go a lot faster if I work it out by creating a rapid feedback loop between what I'm sketching out in front of me, and how I want it to look when it's done. Sometimes when I am very stoned I can enter a state where I'm holding a nearly complete image of the whole drawing in my mind's eye and "tracing" it onto the paper. It's a pretty cool place to be in. But it's super fragile; interrupt me and I'll lose it, with an incoherent fragment of a drawing. So normally, I don't work like that at all - I'll quickly draw the roughest version possible of the important parts of the drawing, and iterate on that until it's done, or until I decide this approach is not working, and try another one. My ideas are in tangible form as soon as possible. When I'm writing (I mostly make comics, so I get to draw AND write), it's the same thing. As soon as I have the germ of a baby idea that sounds okay, I pull out paper or Evernote or whatever and write it down. Interruptions still suck. Interruptions can still take time to recover from. But I don't have to spend a half an hour building up an intricate mental model of what I want to do afterwards from scratch, because I have a pile of roughs and notes that documents the process of getting to where I was. So my suggestion, from how I practice my craft: As soon as you realize you're getting into complex territory, open up a notebook and start scribbling questions and answers and inspirations to yourself, draw little diagrams (or big ones). And mess up your copy of the code with a ton of comments - what's this section doing, what do I need to investigate further, here's some pseudocode for how I might fix this, etc, etc. Document as much of your thinking as possible, put as much of the headspace you're generating outside of your head as you can so that it's easier to pick up the pieces after an interruption.
- existencebox 8y ago
  Apologies HN for the brief comment, but I wanted to make excited noises about how similar your process echoed with how I'd describe my own (especially the "magic time where I try to take the whole problem space into my head" aspect) but within programming. Although, to be fair, even when I'm doing an isolated component on paper programming seems to necessitate that I keep the "local state" up to some reasonable logic isolation boundary in my head as well. It's oddly reassuring to find that I'm not as inefficient/off in left field (with my thought processes) as I thought I was, for whatever reason this isn't a conversation I've had much with other peers. I'll try to make this post more useful than self congratulatory by echoing: Notes notes notes. Whiteboards, sticky notes, and a giant perpetually updated todo list in an email draft (discount-evernote :) ), have been my saving graces, even while my memory gets worse as I age.
doall 8y ago
I think it boils down to something like long term memory vs working memory. In my experience, even if I get interrupted playing a piano score that I practiced hard, I still remember the whole notes and I can easily come back to the state, because the main thing to remember is where I have stopped playing and this easily fits in my working memory. Opposed to that, when I'm in creative mode, I heavily rely on working memory and when I get distracted, new info comes in and my working memory easily blows up. I forget what I was thinking about and cannot come back to the state before I got distracted.
01001010 8y ago
Not at all my experience. Interruptions when designing is, to me, almost free. It's a completely different mental process at work compared to programming. One which does not need much wind-up time at all. I wouldn't say creative work and "create new things that don't exist yet" is what's defining for expensive interruptions. Rather, whether you need to keep a lot of stuff in mental cache or not. That is not true for a large subset of design work. Edit: My personal experience is that interruptions during design work is, in contrast, almost welcome. Once you come back to your designs after an interruption you often see things in a new light and catch stuff you previously didn't see.
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  Yeah designing generally has the benefit that when you look back at what you've been working on the whole thing can be taken in at once, in other creative fields you have lost the context and what you were thinking about - you need to go back and look things over.
duxup 8y ago
Network engineer turned coding n00b here. I like your definition. Interruptions are the same for me coding as they were when I was troubleshooting a difficult network issue. There's so much to consider and as you're iterating through your mind interruptions at the wrong time can be brutal... there's just so many ramifications to consider as you cycle through possibilities that if you're loose your train of thought you really do have to start at point A again if you're going to be careful about what you're doing.
deleted 8y ago
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microtherion 8y ago
> But to write that song or create that dish in the first place, like hell you could do that with all that noise and distraction. A lot of seminal jazz was created on the fly in fairly rowdy venues. But even in that genre, there are performers who can't stand interruptions: http://slippedisc.com/2014/07/keith-jarrett-is-disgraced-in-paris/ http://slippedisc.com/2014/07/keith-jarrett-is-disgraced-in-...

ebbv 8y ago

100%. This is what people fail to realize about programming. Sometimes our job is just writing stuff where we already know what we need to do. That stuff tends to go pretty fast. The hard part of our job, and what takes the majority of my time, is creating solutions to problems. And a lot of that time doesn’t even involve typing. I have to look through documentation, other people’s code, logs. And just think. The typing starts when I have an idea to try out. Interrupting that process is like detailing any other creative process. The problem is not the time I have to take to answer a question, it’s the time it will take to get back into the headspace the interruption took me out of.

deleted 8y ago
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JustSomeNobody 8y ago
That is why I love pencil and paper. As I'm going through code I take notes. As I read doc I take notes. As I'm thinking I take notes. If I do get interrupted it's relatively easy to pick back up because I have all these notes. By the time I'm coding I'm almost always following a mostly fleshed out algorithm so it goes pretty quick.

astrodust 8y ago

Maybe you've boiled it down to "creating" versus "performing", where performances are done by reflex, by habit, by routine, while the creation process takes considerably more attention.

PrunJuice 8y ago
Reminds me of social facilitation theory. In particular "habitual" responses being improved by having an audience and non-habitual responses being hindered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_facilitation#Attention_approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_facilitation#Attention_...

deleted 8y ago

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icebraining 8y ago

I'm not sure. The thing with the musician is that they're not really being interrupted. Sure, there's lights and movement and such, but that's more similar to the background noise we get in an open space environment, which many of us manage to filter out. When they are really interrupted, they are often pissed off too.

egypturnash 8y ago

So, here's my experience in another creative process. I'm an artist. The vast majority of my thinking and planning time happens with a sketchbook or drawing program open in front of me, and me rapidly generating rough sketches and/or story notes. I have learnt over the years that, sure, I can sit there staring off into space trying to work stuff out in my mind's eye all I like, but things go a lot faster if I work it out by creating a rapid feedback loop between what I'm sketching out in front of me, and how I want it to look when it's done. Sometimes when I am very stoned I can enter a state where I'm holding a nearly complete image of the whole drawing in my mind's eye and "tracing" it onto the paper. It's a pretty cool place to be in. But it's super fragile; interrupt me and I'll lose it, with an incoherent fragment of a drawing. So normally, I don't work like that at all - I'll quickly draw the roughest version possible of the important parts of the drawing, and iterate on that until it's done, or until I decide this approach is not working, and try another one. My ideas are in tangible form as soon as possible. When I'm writing (I mostly make comics, so I get to draw AND write), it's the same thing. As soon as I have the germ of a baby idea that sounds okay, I pull out paper or Evernote or whatever and write it down. Interruptions still suck. Interruptions can still take time to recover from. But I don't have to spend a half an hour building up an intricate mental model of what I want to do afterwards from scratch, because I have a pile of roughs and notes that documents the process of getting to where I was. So my suggestion, from how I practice my craft: As soon as you realize you're getting into complex territory, open up a notebook and start scribbling questions and answers and inspirations to yourself, draw little diagrams (or big ones). And mess up your copy of the code with a ton of comments - what's this section doing, what do I need to investigate further, here's some pseudocode for how I might fix this, etc, etc. Document as much of your thinking as possible, put as much of the headspace you're generating outside of your head as you can so that it's easier to pick up the pieces after an interruption.

existencebox 8y ago
Apologies HN for the brief comment, but I wanted to make excited noises about how similar your process echoed with how I'd describe my own (especially the "magic time where I try to take the whole problem space into my head" aspect) but within programming. Although, to be fair, even when I'm doing an isolated component on paper programming seems to necessitate that I keep the "local state" up to some reasonable logic isolation boundary in my head as well. It's oddly reassuring to find that I'm not as inefficient/off in left field (with my thought processes) as I thought I was, for whatever reason this isn't a conversation I've had much with other peers. I'll try to make this post more useful than self congratulatory by echoing: Notes notes notes. Whiteboards, sticky notes, and a giant perpetually updated todo list in an email draft (discount-evernote :) ), have been my saving graces, even while my memory gets worse as I age.

doall 8y ago

I think it boils down to something like long term memory vs working memory. In my experience, even if I get interrupted playing a piano score that I practiced hard, I still remember the whole notes and I can easily come back to the state, because the main thing to remember is where I have stopped playing and this easily fits in my working memory. Opposed to that, when I'm in creative mode, I heavily rely on working memory and when I get distracted, new info comes in and my working memory easily blows up. I forget what I was thinking about and cannot come back to the state before I got distracted.

01001010 8y ago

Not at all my experience. Interruptions when designing is, to me, almost free. It's a completely different mental process at work compared to programming. One which does not need much wind-up time at all. I wouldn't say creative work and "create new things that don't exist yet" is what's defining for expensive interruptions. Rather, whether you need to keep a lot of stuff in mental cache or not. That is not true for a large subset of design work. Edit: My personal experience is that interruptions during design work is, in contrast, almost welcome. Once you come back to your designs after an interruption you often see things in a new light and catch stuff you previously didn't see.

bryanrasmussen 8y ago
Yeah designing generally has the benefit that when you look back at what you've been working on the whole thing can be taken in at once, in other creative fields you have lost the context and what you were thinking about - you need to go back and look things over.

duxup 8y ago

Network engineer turned coding n00b here. I like your definition. Interruptions are the same for me coding as they were when I was troubleshooting a difficult network issue. There's so much to consider and as you're iterating through your mind interruptions at the wrong time can be brutal... there's just so many ramifications to consider as you cycle through possibilities that if you're loose your train of thought you really do have to start at point A again if you're going to be careful about what you're doing.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

microtherion 8y ago

> But to write that song or create that dish in the first place, like hell you could do that with all that noise and distraction. A lot of seminal jazz was created on the fly in fairly rowdy venues. But even in that genre, there are performers who can't stand interruptions: http://slippedisc.com/2014/07/keith-jarrett-is-disgraced-in-paris/ http://slippedisc.com/2014/07/keith-jarrett-is-disgraced-in-...