I think this finding is closely related to the fact that people think they're good at multi-tasking but they're really not. Think of your brain as a cache. Peop

I think this finding is closely related to the fact that people think they're good at multi-tasking but they're really not. Think of your brain as a cache. People sit at work, filling up half of their cache with random data from HN or YouTube or whatever, then when they need to pull up a fact actually needed for their work ... oops, cache miss. Instead of milliseconds pulling it from memory, they spend seconds to minutes looking it up on Google or Stack Overflow and don't even realize how much these interruptions repeated many times a day slow them down. People who will spend hours hyper-optimizing their editor and their window manager and their shell environment for maximum productivity won't spend any time at all keeping the "working set" for their job in memory. It's kind of crazy, really. This is where those 10x differences between developers come from. A bit of talent will get you far, but a modicum of good old-fashioned focus and self-discipline might get you even further.