5 ms·

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (2009)

146 points by feross 5y ago

kokanator 5y ago
This is so true I can't believe I am finally reading 12 years on. We have tried various things, work blocks, no meeting days, etc. without ever really understand what the true root of the issue is. I am curious how others have solved this dilemma in a very business driven world where things are to be managed.
- briandilley 5y ago
  Here's how we do it: - Get rid of as many standing meetings as you can, and then get rid of more of them (1 a week is max) - At the end of every standing meeting, ask the group "Do we still need this meeting?" - If you feel you need a regular standup, do it on slack/whatever-you-use instead and asynchronous - The non-makers still need to be able to communicate with the makers, provide a clear chain of communication so that the smallest number of makers are disturbed in an ad-hoc fashion, preferably only 1 (usually a tech lead / engineering manager)
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > I am curious how others have solved this dilemma in a very business driven world where things are to be managed. As an engineer-turned-manager, I try to be respectful of people's time when it comes to meetings. Basic meeting courtesy is mandatory: - Schedule meetings at convenient times for everyone, preferably around natural breaks like lunch time. 1PM meeting after lunch before everyone gets back to work is good. 10:30AM meetings that break up people's morning are bad. - Send a short agenda for the meeting in the invite. No agenda = no meeting is a good rule. Request agendas from others when invited to a meeting. - Stick to the agenda and respect people's time. If a conversation goes on more than a few minutes but only concerns a few people, either have them take it offline or add it to the bottom of the agenda so you can cover it after everyone else has been dismissed. - Keep things as predictable as possible. It's much better if everyone knows that meetings are generally scheduled around lunch time, always come with an agenda, and that off-topic discussions will be discouraged. Don't keep people guessing about whether or not a meeting will be productive. Finally, some employees can benefit from a little coaching and mentoring about how to get back in the groove. If someone is struggling to get anything done on days with meetings, they will likely benefit from some coaching about how to best manage interruptions and get back into the workflow. They can also benefit from increased accountability around those days, which doesn't have to be painful if handled correctly. Some people have some "learned helplessness" around interruptions at other companies where they don't bother doing anything on days where meetings are on their calendar. Training this out of employees and setting healthy but reasonable expectations is very important.
  - tetha 5y ago
    For me, 'office days' as you'd see in a university also works well. At work, people value and like to request my input on various architectual or technical things, so managing interuptions besides some technical tasks can be a challenge. As such, I've been pushing all of these discussions and meetings to tuesday afternoon, or maybe thursday afternoon on some weeks. Sure, there might be 6 or 8 different topics on that afternoon, but that's fine with decent meeting culture and some preparation.
- jkingsbery 5y ago
  For any meeting I schedule, in addition to having sent the agenda over email, I always kick off the meeting with "Here's what I want to get out of our time together: <spiel goes here>..." and then some variation of "Does that seem like the right set of things to talk about?" The last 2 VPs I've been under have had similar takes on meeting attendance: don't feel obliged to continue in a meeting if it's not providing value to you and you aren't providing value to it. This is, admittedly, way easier in COVID, where you can just drop off without much notice. But there's a polite way to do this in person (send an IM message to the meeting organizer politely saying you have other commitment/need to work on a near term delivery, and excuse yourself from the room). Depending on the situation, I've found your-mileage-may-vary with trying no meeting days. Currently, as a principal engineer at a big tech company, it pretty much doesn't work. At smaller companies (or in smaller teams) I've found it works better.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I remember this article being very influential to me when I read it over a decade ago. This entry in particular resonated with my younger self: > I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Over the years as I've gone back and forth between IC and management, adjusted my working schedule after having kids, and generally improved my self-control habits, I no longer identify with this part of the essay. In retrospect, this essay told me what I wanted to hear at the time: That I was a maker and that my managers just didn't understand that my lack of productivity was actually their fault for scheduling a single 1-hour meeting in the middle of the day. I thought meetings should be someone else's job, not mine, and I ate up every excuse to despise them. This essay included. The reality was that my company at the time didn't have an excessive number of meetings, nor were they poorly run. Some companies really do have a ridiculous number of poorly-run meetings, but it's not the norm at well-run engineering companies in my experience. (If your company is all meetings and no work, it's time to change jobs). Eventually I started making an effort to get back into the groove quickly after interruptions. When I get back to my desk, I pause for a moment and make a deliberate effort to recall where I left off. I decide what I'm going to work on before I unlock the screen. I resist the urge to pull up my e-mail or HN or Twitter or Instagram for "just a few minutes" before getting back to work. And to my surprise, it worked! If I put some minimal effort into it, I can get right back into the task I was working on, even complex ones like debugging complicated programs. PG talking about "spirits" dictating our productivity now reminds me of a famous quote that has been attributed to various authors at different times: > I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  Isn't the problem really about cognitive load though? I agree with you that a 1 hour meeting probably shouldn't ruin your whole day, but I also feel like it can take a fair bit of time to essentially reload the problem I've been working on back into my brain if it happens to be a fairly complex one. This is compounded if it's an actual meaty technical meeting because not only do I lose my train of thought but I have to start a while bunch of other ones and also attempt to jot them down before returning to where I was. Sounds like you've been at this significantly longer than me, maybe context switching is a skill I just haven't acquired yet...
ineedasername 5y ago
Whenever I control or can influence a meeting time, I find the earliest time of day I can. That way, whatever time is left in the workday, it's mine to focus on whatever project is at hand.
- indigomm 5y ago
  However the advantage (at least to me) of meeting later in the day is that I may well be flagging anyway, and meetings tend to require less concentration. My preference is therefore to try and group meetings together and block out one or more afternoons for them as necessary.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Good point: I'm hit or miss at the end of the day: sometimes my brain is fried an hour before the end, and I need to switch to what I term "general housekeeping" tasks. Other days I'm so engrossed in a project that I have to set an alarm to make sure I leave early enough to not put all of the child care tasks on my partner, who usually gets home a bit earlier.
l8rpeace 5y ago
The switching cost is real. I explained this to folks at Microsoft. Microsoft is kind of bad at allowing for focused work in the scenarios I've observed (not necessarily a universal paradigm). I also once kept the "dinner to 3 am" schedule with 10-4 meetings at Microsoft and it was very effective for everything except my personal life. I've lived this both as an engineer and a PM. I tried to set aside at least 4 hrs focus time for people that reported to me, no matter their role. Not many others respect those boundaries.
- thrower123 5y ago
  A trap that I've been caught in repeatedly over the years is the 10AM, 3PM daily standing meeting pattern, which is almost uniquely capable of preventing any actual work from being done. It often manifests as an Agile/Scrum standup at 10AM that balloons into an hour-long status meeting. This effect worsens as people start to treat that meeting as the beginning of the work-day, and increasingly show up later, and more unprepared. Then, after that meeting completes, there is a brief flurry to handle any follow-ups generated by the morning meetings, and then it is lunch time. People drag back in from lunch, and maybe handle some responses from their pre-lunch follow-ups, and then it is time for the standing afternoon meeting. Usually this just recapitulates everything that was discussed in the morning, since no one has had any time to actually do anything. By the time it finally wraps up at 4:30 PM, everyone's brains have utterly dissolved, and they go home. And then it starts again.
  - 100011_100001 5y ago
    10AM standup kills me. I have repetitively asked for that time to be changed but no one wants it to be earlier. 8-8:30 I check on all my chats, emails, plan my day Usually something comes up that I need to address, look at etc...so suddenly it's 9:15-9:30. If I start, 10am will break my flow right when I go deep, if I don't I feel like I wasted 30 minutes. Then 30m-1hr standup....anything out of the standup affects my 11 to 11:30...but then lunch is starting in 30 minutes. So again at the same problem start and break flow or don't start at all? Combine that with a 1:30 meeting or something like that I can't do any deep work till 3pm.
  - 5y ago
CuriousPerson23 5y ago
We're actually working on a product to help with this. More generally, we're focused on the massive impact meetings have on our day/team and how we can get the most from them. One of our main benefits to start is that we automatically send a simple prompt to meeting attendees after a recurring meetings to rate the meeting, and then give you a view of that rating over time. You can log in and view the most time consuming meetings for the team and how their ratings are changing over time. This way, if a recurring meeting started as useful but is no longer serving it's purpose, it becomes easy to detect and eliminate. If anyone would be interested in joining our beta program, we're offering the tool completely free in exchange for feedback. Let me know!
- CuriousPerson23 5y ago
  You can reach out to me at ori @ culture [and then the word] science and .io. Sorry for the crazy anti-spam format :)
nooyurrsdey 5y ago
I agree with all the points about context switching and managing the right schedule, but I'm getting slightly exhausted with this divide between "managers" and "makers". It feels like managers are indirectly getting demonized as some bloated overhead. I'd like to see an org function long term with no managers - I'll bet good money it can't be done.
nine_zeros 5y ago
For devs looking for "good" management (and for existing managers that don't know what they are doing but are willing to let go of their ego), here are a few questions to ask - Is the manager reducing bureaucracy for you or increasing it? Reducing is better - Is the manager able to solve people challenges or is he shoving it down to you? Politics is strictly a management domain. They should be able to talk around the org and get shit done, even when someone not on their team is impeding progress - Does the manager take ownership of failures of the team or does he shove down the failure to ICs? For those uninitiated, the manager takes responsibility of failed projects - Does the manager celebrate your achievements and success or do they just paper over it? The manager should be the biggest cheerleader of successes of their engineers. If they don't highlight your work to upper management, that will impede your growth in the career ladder. DO NOT WORK TOO HARD for such lazy, incompetent managers. Your work is not appreciated - Does you manager lie? Should be obvious, but a lying manager will lie to save themselves, even if they are only lying to others today. Is this checklist large? Not really considering how much impact a manager can have on an ICs career. ICs should be aware of these traits and should hold their managers to high standards. If manager cannot do even this much, quit asap.
jshen 5y ago
I don’t know if Paul G has ever been a leader of a large organization, but he gets it wrong when it comes to managers. Managers and executives need deep work time as well, they just have higher demands to context switch more frequently than ICs. If you do go into management, learn to protect enough time for deep work, you need it too. Edit: "They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started." This right here is frankly bullshit, and it's wrong on two levels. 1. You absolutely can get into coding or writing in chunks of less than half a day. Second, thinking strategically as a leader is just as hard to get into as coding and/or writing. Leaders/managers have the same challenge, they just have busier calendars.
karmakaze 5y ago
> When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called "business stuff." I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's. Co-incidentally I found myself working this same schedule at my first full-time job in the 90s. The 11am slipped into mid-afternoon and there was a period where an all-hands/devs meeting (I think it was for deciding the release details of our shrink-wrap physically shipped software) was set for 6pm to be certain I'd be present. It certainly was productive. Sometimes I'd have a vague idea in the afternoon and have a prototype running demos the next day that became a shipping feature within a week.
kazinator 5y ago
I don't think this article tells the full story. When you love what you're making, you can do it in small increments amid interruptions, and pick up right where you left off. Your brain never leaves "maker mode"; the gears keep spinning in the background while you're away from it. That's how it's been on my side projects for years. You might get large blocks of uninterrupted time at a job during weekday office hours, but not in side projects evenings and weekends. Not if you have a family. When you love the project, you will be surprised at how well you can progress in 5, 10, 15-minute intervals virtually as if they were a single block of time. I've returned to half-done code (not even syntactically valid), half-written commit messages, debug sessions, and picked it up without skipping a beat. I think the interruptions are harmful when you're working on something you don't fully understand. You had to ramp up on it quickly, and to get through the task, you're juggling a whole clump of new, unfamiliar information in your short-term memory --- some of it not even proper information, but unconfirmed, competing hypotheses on how various things work. You have to work hard just to build that up so you can navigate and contextualize what you're doing. Much of that short term information can vaporize if you are interrupted. But that's not exactly the situation of maker. The maker knows what he or she is making. He or she understands the existing thing, inside out; none of that vaporizes due to an interruption. So how can someone deal with interruptions who is in this situation? I think: write stuff down! Don't carry it all in your head. Document. Open a "knowledge file" and type. If you have three competing, unconfirmed hypotheses about how something works, write them out. After an interruption, you can reload the context by re-reading that file. If you have a plan about what your next steps are, write those steps down. Write down what you've already tried and the results.

146 points by feross 5y ago

This is so true I can't believe I am finally reading 12 years on. We have tried various things, work blocks, no meeting days, etc. without ever really understand what the true root of the issue is. I am curious how others have solved this dilemma in a very business driven world where things are to be managed.

briandilley 5y ago
Here's how we do it: - Get rid of as many standing meetings as you can, and then get rid of more of them (1 a week is max) - At the end of every standing meeting, ask the group "Do we still need this meeting?" - If you feel you need a regular standup, do it on slack/whatever-you-use instead and asynchronous - The non-makers still need to be able to communicate with the makers, provide a clear chain of communication so that the smallest number of makers are disturbed in an ad-hoc fashion, preferably only 1 (usually a tech lead / engineering manager)
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I am curious how others have solved this dilemma in a very business driven world where things are to be managed. As an engineer-turned-manager, I try to be respectful of people's time when it comes to meetings. Basic meeting courtesy is mandatory: - Schedule meetings at convenient times for everyone, preferably around natural breaks like lunch time. 1PM meeting after lunch before everyone gets back to work is good. 10:30AM meetings that break up people's morning are bad. - Send a short agenda for the meeting in the invite. No agenda = no meeting is a good rule. Request agendas from others when invited to a meeting. - Stick to the agenda and respect people's time. If a conversation goes on more than a few minutes but only concerns a few people, either have them take it offline or add it to the bottom of the agenda so you can cover it after everyone else has been dismissed. - Keep things as predictable as possible. It's much better if everyone knows that meetings are generally scheduled around lunch time, always come with an agenda, and that off-topic discussions will be discouraged. Don't keep people guessing about whether or not a meeting will be productive. Finally, some employees can benefit from a little coaching and mentoring about how to get back in the groove. If someone is struggling to get anything done on days with meetings, they will likely benefit from some coaching about how to best manage interruptions and get back into the workflow. They can also benefit from increased accountability around those days, which doesn't have to be painful if handled correctly. Some people have some "learned helplessness" around interruptions at other companies where they don't bother doing anything on days where meetings are on their calendar. Training this out of employees and setting healthy but reasonable expectations is very important.
- tetha 5y ago
  For me, 'office days' as you'd see in a university also works well. At work, people value and like to request my input on various architectual or technical things, so managing interuptions besides some technical tasks can be a challenge. As such, I've been pushing all of these discussions and meetings to tuesday afternoon, or maybe thursday afternoon on some weeks. Sure, there might be 6 or 8 different topics on that afternoon, but that's fine with decent meeting culture and some preparation.
jkingsbery 5y ago
For any meeting I schedule, in addition to having sent the agenda over email, I always kick off the meeting with "Here's what I want to get out of our time together: <spiel goes here>..." and then some variation of "Does that seem like the right set of things to talk about?" The last 2 VPs I've been under have had similar takes on meeting attendance: don't feel obliged to continue in a meeting if it's not providing value to you and you aren't providing value to it. This is, admittedly, way easier in COVID, where you can just drop off without much notice. But there's a polite way to do this in person (send an IM message to the meeting organizer politely saying you have other commitment/need to work on a near term delivery, and excuse yourself from the room). Depending on the situation, I've found your-mileage-may-vary with trying no meeting days. Currently, as a principal engineer at a big tech company, it pretty much doesn't work. At smaller companies (or in smaller teams) I've found it works better.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I remember this article being very influential to me when I read it over a decade ago. This entry in particular resonated with my younger self: > I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Over the years as I've gone back and forth between IC and management, adjusted my working schedule after having kids, and generally improved my self-control habits, I no longer identify with this part of the essay. In retrospect, this essay told me what I wanted to hear at the time: That I was a maker and that my managers just didn't understand that my lack of productivity was actually their fault for scheduling a single 1-hour meeting in the middle of the day. I thought meetings should be someone else's job, not mine, and I ate up every excuse to despise them. This essay included. The reality was that my company at the time didn't have an excessive number of meetings, nor were they poorly run. Some companies really do have a ridiculous number of poorly-run meetings, but it's not the norm at well-run engineering companies in my experience. (If your company is all meetings and no work, it's time to change jobs). Eventually I started making an effort to get back into the groove quickly after interruptions. When I get back to my desk, I pause for a moment and make a deliberate effort to recall where I left off. I decide what I'm going to work on before I unlock the screen. I resist the urge to pull up my e-mail or HN or Twitter or Instagram for "just a few minutes" before getting back to work. And to my surprise, it worked! If I put some minimal effort into it, I can get right back into the task I was working on, even complex ones like debugging complicated programs. PG talking about "spirits" dictating our productivity now reminds me of a famous quote that has been attributed to various authors at different times: > I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.

only_as_i_fall 5y ago
Isn't the problem really about cognitive load though? I agree with you that a 1 hour meeting probably shouldn't ruin your whole day, but I also feel like it can take a fair bit of time to essentially reload the problem I've been working on back into my brain if it happens to be a fairly complex one. This is compounded if it's an actual meaty technical meeting because not only do I lose my train of thought but I have to start a while bunch of other ones and also attempt to jot them down before returning to where I was. Sounds like you've been at this significantly longer than me, maybe context switching is a skill I just haven't acquired yet...

ineedasername 5y ago

Whenever I control or can influence a meeting time, I find the earliest time of day I can. That way, whatever time is left in the workday, it's mine to focus on whatever project is at hand.

indigomm 5y ago
However the advantage (at least to me) of meeting later in the day is that I may well be flagging anyway, and meetings tend to require less concentration. My preference is therefore to try and group meetings together and block out one or more afternoons for them as necessary.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Good point: I'm hit or miss at the end of the day: sometimes my brain is fried an hour before the end, and I need to switch to what I term "general housekeeping" tasks. Other days I'm so engrossed in a project that I have to set an alarm to make sure I leave early enough to not put all of the child care tasks on my partner, who usually gets home a bit earlier.

l8rpeace 5y ago

The switching cost is real. I explained this to folks at Microsoft. Microsoft is kind of bad at allowing for focused work in the scenarios I've observed (not necessarily a universal paradigm). I also once kept the "dinner to 3 am" schedule with 10-4 meetings at Microsoft and it was very effective for everything except my personal life. I've lived this both as an engineer and a PM. I tried to set aside at least 4 hrs focus time for people that reported to me, no matter their role. Not many others respect those boundaries.

thrower123 5y ago
A trap that I've been caught in repeatedly over the years is the 10AM, 3PM daily standing meeting pattern, which is almost uniquely capable of preventing any actual work from being done. It often manifests as an Agile/Scrum standup at 10AM that balloons into an hour-long status meeting. This effect worsens as people start to treat that meeting as the beginning of the work-day, and increasingly show up later, and more unprepared. Then, after that meeting completes, there is a brief flurry to handle any follow-ups generated by the morning meetings, and then it is lunch time. People drag back in from lunch, and maybe handle some responses from their pre-lunch follow-ups, and then it is time for the standing afternoon meeting. Usually this just recapitulates everything that was discussed in the morning, since no one has had any time to actually do anything. By the time it finally wraps up at 4:30 PM, everyone's brains have utterly dissolved, and they go home. And then it starts again.
- 100011_100001 5y ago
  10AM standup kills me. I have repetitively asked for that time to be changed but no one wants it to be earlier. 8-8:30 I check on all my chats, emails, plan my day Usually something comes up that I need to address, look at etc...so suddenly it's 9:15-9:30. If I start, 10am will break my flow right when I go deep, if I don't I feel like I wasted 30 minutes. Then 30m-1hr standup....anything out of the standup affects my 11 to 11:30...but then lunch is starting in 30 minutes. So again at the same problem start and break flow or don't start at all? Combine that with a 1:30 meeting or something like that I can't do any deep work till 3pm.
- 5y ago

CuriousPerson23 5y ago

We're actually working on a product to help with this. More generally, we're focused on the massive impact meetings have on our day/team and how we can get the most from them. One of our main benefits to start is that we automatically send a simple prompt to meeting attendees after a recurring meetings to rate the meeting, and then give you a view of that rating over time. You can log in and view the most time consuming meetings for the team and how their ratings are changing over time. This way, if a recurring meeting started as useful but is no longer serving it's purpose, it becomes easy to detect and eliminate. If anyone would be interested in joining our beta program, we're offering the tool completely free in exchange for feedback. Let me know!

CuriousPerson23 5y ago
You can reach out to me at ori @ culture [and then the word] science and .io. Sorry for the crazy anti-spam format :)

nooyurrsdey 5y ago

I agree with all the points about context switching and managing the right schedule, but I'm getting slightly exhausted with this divide between "managers" and "makers". It feels like managers are indirectly getting demonized as some bloated overhead. I'd like to see an org function long term with no managers - I'll bet good money it can't be done.

nine_zeros 5y ago

For devs looking for "good" management (and for existing managers that don't know what they are doing but are willing to let go of their ego), here are a few questions to ask - Is the manager reducing bureaucracy for you or increasing it? Reducing is better - Is the manager able to solve people challenges or is he shoving it down to you? Politics is strictly a management domain. They should be able to talk around the org and get shit done, even when someone not on their team is impeding progress - Does the manager take ownership of failures of the team or does he shove down the failure to ICs? For those uninitiated, the manager takes responsibility of failed projects - Does the manager celebrate your achievements and success or do they just paper over it? The manager should be the biggest cheerleader of successes of their engineers. If they don't highlight your work to upper management, that will impede your growth in the career ladder. DO NOT WORK TOO HARD for such lazy, incompetent managers. Your work is not appreciated - Does you manager lie? Should be obvious, but a lying manager will lie to save themselves, even if they are only lying to others today. Is this checklist large? Not really considering how much impact a manager can have on an ICs career. ICs should be aware of these traits and should hold their managers to high standards. If manager cannot do even this much, quit asap.

jshen 5y ago

I don’t know if Paul G has ever been a leader of a large organization, but he gets it wrong when it comes to managers. Managers and executives need deep work time as well, they just have higher demands to context switch more frequently than ICs. If you do go into management, learn to protect enough time for deep work, you need it too. Edit: "They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started." This right here is frankly bullshit, and it's wrong on two levels. 1. You absolutely can get into coding or writing in chunks of less than half a day. Second, thinking strategically as a leader is just as hard to get into as coding and/or writing. Leaders/managers have the same challenge, they just have busier calendars.

karmakaze 5y ago

> When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called "business stuff." I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's. Co-incidentally I found myself working this same schedule at my first full-time job in the 90s. The 11am slipped into mid-afternoon and there was a period where an all-hands/devs meeting (I think it was for deciding the release details of our shrink-wrap physically shipped software) was set for 6pm to be certain I'd be present. It certainly was productive. Sometimes I'd have a vague idea in the afternoon and have a prototype running demos the next day that became a shipping feature within a week.

kazinator 5y ago

I don't think this article tells the full story. When you love what you're making, you can do it in small increments amid interruptions, and pick up right where you left off. Your brain never leaves "maker mode"; the gears keep spinning in the background while you're away from it. That's how it's been on my side projects for years. You might get large blocks of uninterrupted time at a job during weekday office hours, but not in side projects evenings and weekends. Not if you have a family. When you love the project, you will be surprised at how well you can progress in 5, 10, 15-minute intervals virtually as if they were a single block of time. I've returned to half-done code (not even syntactically valid), half-written commit messages, debug sessions, and picked it up without skipping a beat. I think the interruptions are harmful when you're working on something you don't fully understand. You had to ramp up on it quickly, and to get through the task, you're juggling a whole clump of new, unfamiliar information in your short-term memory --- some of it not even proper information, but unconfirmed, competing hypotheses on how various things work. You have to work hard just to build that up so you can navigate and contextualize what you're doing. Much of that short term information can vaporize if you are interrupted. But that's not exactly the situation of maker. The maker knows what he or she is making. He or she understands the existing thing, inside out; none of that vaporizes due to an interruption. So how can someone deal with interruptions who is in this situation? I think: write stuff down! Don't carry it all in your head. Document. Open a "knowledge file" and type. If you have three competing, unconfirmed hypotheses about how something works, write them out. After an interruption, you can reload the context by re-reading that file. If you have a plan about what your next steps are, write those steps down. Write down what you've already tried and the results.