> I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning. I feel like this undersells the problem, in part because writing

> I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning. I feel like this undersells the problem, in part because writing does not perfectly match onto software engineering. I've been working on my productivity for years and I've found how much I'm impacted by interruptions is directly proportional to how hard I need to concentrate to get the work done. Occasionally my work really pushes up against the limit of how much cognitive load I can handle at which point if the problem required me to track a single more moving piece it would fall apart and I'd fail to solve the problem. At the level of concentration required for that kind of cognitive load I find that on most days I have 2-4 hours of work in me and it must be in a single continuous stream. If I'm interrupted after the first half hour I can still work but I can't get back to that level no matter how hard I try. Most work doesn't push me that hard. If I'm writing a simple database query or a form in React interruptions are still bad but not so much they ruin my productivity. I've found this pattern holds true for a goodly number of other engineers as well and think managers should be cognizant of how hard their engineers find their work and plan accordingly. The impact will be different on different teams e.g. my experience would suggest minor interruptions are far less ruinous for web dev teams than those working hard systems work.