Separate developer days into blocks. A small block at the beginning of the day for an "open house" where anyone can directly ask questions of devs, come to chi

Separate developer days into blocks. A small block at the beginning of the day for an "open house" where anyone can directly ask questions of devs, come to chit chat, etc. One block can be support tasks / ticket fixing. Contacting devs is OK here but it's preferred to be in the open house time. Another block can be heads-down, planned development. Developers don't get bugged here unless there's an active fire burning. The plan should be set forth at the beginning of the week so there's no confusion. We've been doing this for a couple of weeks (after a department reorganization) and it's been working pretty well. It's important to get buy-in from the rest of the company on the idea that context switches are actively harmful to development. Joel Spolsky knows it[1]. Jeff Atwood knows it[2]. So do many others. But you have to get management to understand it, or you'll never escape from the constant "just a small fix" interruptions. 1. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html 2. http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-multi-tasking-myth/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-multi-tasking-myth/