> Whining about how your "flow state" can't be interrupted because of how extraordinarily creative and artistic you are is just pretentious. Either I am doing

> Whining about how your "flow state" can't be interrupted because of how extraordinarily creative and artistic you are is just pretentious. Either I am doing something wrong/I'm stupid or not all coding jobs need the same kind if deep work. Because more than 90% of my individual technical work requires me to be in a flow state. It takes a good 30 minutes to hold a really large thought in mhead, and I can't start coding until I feel like I'm mentally present. Now I have actually done different jobs too. I have presided over clubs in school, I worked as a mechanical engineer for a while and I used to write comedy scripts for dramas. None of them required flow state to the same degree. Math derivations required an even higher flow state, and that's the only exception. I mentioned writing scripts. It actually requires a flow state, but it is more like pair programming and a group activity, so if you lose context someone will quickly bring you back to where you were. Maybe other roles are more easily chunkable or people just don't care about making sure that their work doesn't have side effects or how it fits into the whole. But, I've found this one complaint by developers to be quite genuine. __________ One thing that has worked is to write down entire interfaces, contracts and explicit steps before I even start. This step absolutely needs deep work and usually take 7-8 hours at a time. However, once it is done, you can address each step or class as if it is somewhat side effect free. As a tangent, this is also why I hate using classes when state doesn't exist. A function allows for so much better side-effect free mental compartmentalization than instance methods.