92
votes

If you just consider the second part of my question, "Why a developer should not be interrupted while neck-deep in coding", that has been discussed a number of times by smart people. Heck, even the co-founder of SO, Joel Spolsky, wrote a blog post about "getting in the zone" and "being knocked out of the zone" and why it takes an average of 15 minutes to achieve productivity when participating in complex, software development related tasks. So I think the why has been established.

What I'm interested in is how to explain all that to somebody who doesn't know beans about Beans (khmm I mean software development). How to tell the wife, or the funny guy from accounting at the workplace, or the long time friend who pings you on Skype every 30 minutes with a "Wazzzzzzup?!", that all the interruptions have a much deeper impact on your work than the obvious 30 seconds they took from your time. Obviously you can't explain it by sentences like "I have to juggle a lot of variable names in my short term memory" unless you want to be the target of blank stares or friendly abuse.

I'd like to be able to explain all that to non-developers in a way that will make them clearly understand - without being offensive, elitist or too technical.

EDIT: Thanks to everyone for their great insights. I've accepted EpsilonVector's answer as his analogy was the closest one to my original needs. The "falling asleep" explanation is neither offensive nor technical, almost anyone can relate to it, and the consequences of getting disturbed while falling asleep or while being in the zone are very similar: you experience frustration and you "lose" 15-20 minutes of time.

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  • 36
    Have them start from 0 and count to a very large number, mid way through yell look! squirrel!
    – Tim Post
    Feb 10, 2011 at 14:12
  • 8
    Surely relevant to most professions, try stopping a surgeon mid-flow.
    – ozz
    Feb 10, 2011 at 14:23
  • 24
    get off skype at work.
    – Josh
    Feb 10, 2011 at 14:28
  • 6
    "without being offensive", I knew there was a catch somewhere. :)
    – biziclop
    Feb 10, 2011 at 19:40
  • 7
    @Josh At work we use Skype for interoffice communication. We need it open. I have a separate work account, but you still run into these issues.
    – Matthew Scharley
    Feb 10, 2011 at 20:10

18 Answers 18

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124
votes

Try the following analogies: First one: "How long does it take for you to fall asleep?" "X minutes" "Now imagine that when you are close to falling asleep, someone walks in and interrupts you, how long will it take you to fall asleep now? Those few seconds you had left, or will you have to start again to 'sink back' to where you were?" "I'll have to start again" "Great. Same thing. Just like falling asleep, it takes me a while to 'sink' into focus mode, and it takes me a while to get back to it once I'm interrupted, except that I also forget half of what I was doing."

Second one: "You know how when you're reading a book you 'sink into it'- after a while you don't even notice the words anymore, and you block out everything around yourself, and are totally immersed in the mental images you see." "Yes." "How long does it take for you to get there?" "About X minutes" "Now imagine that when you are that immersed in the book someone walks in and interrupts you, how long will it take you to get back to that? Will it happen immediately, or will you have to start again to 'sink back' to where you were?" "I'll have to start again" "Great. Same thing. Just like with reading, it takes me a while to 'sink' into focus mode, it's just as annoying when someone breaks me out of it, and it takes me just as long to get back to it once I'm interrupted, except that I also forget half of what I read."

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    +1 excellent, excellent, especially the "falling asleep" one. Exactly the kind of explanation I was looking for.
    – András Szepesházi
    Feb 10, 2011 at 14:53
  • 1
    Might not help - I can fall straight back to sleep normally...
    – Armand
    Feb 10, 2011 at 15:29
  • 1
    @Alison I don't know about can't, but there's plenty of people who don't read and hence can't relate to the second point.
    – Matthew Scharley
    Feb 10, 2011 at 20:15
  • 3
    Love the falling asleep metaphor, but I won't be using that to explain my job to my wife any time soon! ;>
    – dthorpe
    Feb 10, 2011 at 20:42
  • 7
    Don't Wake Up the Programmer alexthunder.livejournal.com/309815.html
    – Chris Nava
    Feb 17, 2011 at 5:22
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votes

I don't think that the state of reverie that Joel describes is technical. It's the same right-brain shift that anyone experiences when they draw or fall under the spell of a really good book. (Betty Edwards' "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" describes it perfectly.) Everyone has experienced that sense of concentration where you're unaware of the passage of time.

I think it's condescending right off the bat to imagine that this is something that only technical people understand, that the concept needs to be dumbed down for non-developers to understand. Just explain in plain language - they'll get it.

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    In my experience, they not necesserily get it - they might accept it as a fact, but still can't relate to that. For most people I know, work is just work that can be suspened or continued any time.
    – András Szepesházi
    Feb 10, 2011 at 13:40
  • 3
    Not the people I talk to. In my experience, everyone who does work that's doing non-rote tasks would be able to relate perfectly. Maybe you're talking to too many people doing rote tasks.
    – duffymo
    Feb 10, 2011 at 13:42
  • 3
    @duffymo: Hmm. I don't consider a sales person who is writing a customized offer for a customer doing a rote task. Still, if I interrupt him/her, he/she will lose maximum half a minute until getting back on track. That's what I meant - most jobs are a lot easier to suspend/continue than ours. IMHO.
    – András Szepesházi
    Feb 10, 2011 at 13:55
  • 5
    It's a matter of how much state you lose. Programmers tend to need to keep a whole program state in their head while coding, but other professions that involve more writing keep state on the document they are constructing. Which state is easier to restore?
    – Michael K
    Feb 10, 2011 at 14:01
  • 2
    I think a lot depends on whether the person actually experiences the state of flow during his/her work (or free time). If they ever did, they will understand better what we mean.
    – Péter Török
    Feb 10, 2011 at 14:16
23
votes

Re-route your internal thread to verbal IO, i.e. turn round when they interrupt you and keep mumbling code and looking into the middle distance until they give up and go away. If they talk, just mumble louder.

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    LOL this is good but certainly leads to a divorce if the interruptor is the wife.
    – András Szepesházi
    Feb 10, 2011 at 14:02
  • This is definitely the faster, more effective approach! :P
    – Robin Maben
    Nov 7, 2013 at 10:26
16
votes

Tell them that coding (or insert other high concentration activity here) is like being a circus performer who does the spinning plates act.

First you start by spinning one plate on a stick, get that going, then start spinning a second plate, get that going, go back to the first plate, give it a little extra spin to keep it going, then start spinning a third plate, get it going, then go back to the second plate, little extra spin, first plate extra spin, third plate extra spin, then start spinning fourth, etc etc.

Then the phone rings and all the plates fall down.

Flow state is gone. You now have to start all over. Get one plate spinning...

I like to think of each plate as a chunk of data, variable, concept, state, etc that you have to maintain in your head.

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13
votes

A few months ago I had someone walk into my cube and pull my earbuds out while I was coding. Internal fury aside, my approach was to explain that often times programmers are deep in logical thought which requires a different and concentrated approach to thinking and that interrupting suddenly can really mess up the thought process. It hasn't happened from that person again, so maybe it worked. Another thing you might consider is the busy/free sign. I have a friend that does algorithms and he has a two sided sign that say "Coding - Do not interrupt" on one side and "Free to Chat" on the other. Removing ambiguity is the key here.

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    As long you leave the "Free to Chat" side up a reasonable amount of the time. If the "Do not interrupt" side is always up, you may as well not have a sign at all...
    – Dean Harding
    Feb 10, 2011 at 14:06
  • 4
    Seems like it would get annoying, having to flip the sign around all the time.
    – Nobody
    Feb 10, 2011 at 14:14
  • 3
    You could have a Thinking Cap instead of a sign. Whenever you've got your Thinking Cap on, people shouldn't interrupt you.
    – Ant
    Feb 10, 2011 at 14:31
  • 3
    Wouldn't "Free to chat" imply (to managers): "I don't have enough work to do"?
    – badgerr
    Feb 10, 2011 at 14:42
  • 8
    At my workplace our undocumented "in the zone" indicator is presence of headphones. The boss has said, "even if you're not listening to anything, put them on if you're concentrating. We'll take that to mean you're busy."
    – JYelton
    Feb 10, 2011 at 16:23
12
votes

Ok, I'm adding my own answer (I know this is a bit dorky, but maybe it sheds some extra light on what I was aiming at).

I said the following to someone who interrupted me recently at a bad time: "Developing software is like driving a car in a very busy road for the first time in your life. All your attention is focused on the wheel and the pedals and the cars rushing around you, and you simply don't have any extra bit of attention for a nice chat. If you start focusing on what the chat is about, you're bound to lose control over the car and you'll end up in an accident".

This was something the person could relate to, but it is far from a good analogy. If I get interrupted the consequence will be very different from an accident. I've been doing sw development for 2 decades so why do I compare this to something that is being done for the first time. And so on.

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    It's a good analogy. Just remove the 'first time' part and emphasize that it is a very busy road, with lots of crossroads, traffic lights, trucks an bicycles and that's it. Especially since the crossroads are good to represent all the decisions you have to take, without always knowing what can hit your car behind the corner.
    – Goran Jovic
    Feb 10, 2011 at 15:37
  • I don't think this is a good analogy, and I think you admit that yourself, but if it gets them to respect your development time, then use it.
    – Bernard
    Feb 10, 2011 at 16:07
  • That's not bad.
    – Marcie
    Feb 10, 2011 at 16:50
  • 4
    Just add that there are already three screaming children in the back that you're struggling to ignore (all your own natural distractions).
    – Benjol
    Feb 11, 2011 at 8:16
7
votes

"Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow" is a good TED Talk about this idea of being really productive under certain conditions that may or may not appeal to people. Don't forget that for some people they may never want to understand the explanation and thus it is kind of like beating the dead horse recursively ad infinitum.

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4
votes

I call it a programmers trance. There are lots of good analogies here, so what's one more eh? As has been said earlier, a programmer will mentally navigate several different logic flows until the right one presents itself. THEN it gets written in code and saved on the computer.

So, say you're writing a term paper or important document. The thoughts are flowing into words into the computer but you haven't saved the changes yet. Then poof, the power goes or the computer crashes. Getting all that back will take as long or longer and will never be the same as the original. (How many of us old timers have had THAT happen?)

This is what happens to the code in your head when interrupted. Thoughts are as fragile as smoke. If they have not yet been saved and something comes along to disrupt them, they're gone.

1
  • I like this one the best, because a lot of people will understand it, and because it sufficiently expresses that it won't take 15 minutes to get back into it, it will take longer than the first time and with worse results.,
    – orbfish
    Apr 9, 2011 at 22:27
3
votes

Dear Distinguished CoWorker, In an effort to become more efficient I am focusing on my work and am answering questions through email at moments between work to keep interruption at a minimum to better serve you and Company name_. Please email me and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Thank you.

2
votes

If you listen to music, put up a sign that says something along the lines of

Headphones on? Please do not interrupt.

This is only effective if anyone reads and you don't always have your headphones on.

1
  • For me it'd be the other way round. Listening to music and deep concentration don't go together for me.
    – CodesInChaos
    Mar 31, 2012 at 10:48
2
votes

I think of it as a big web of complex connections that I have to build up in my mind, a structure of interlocking relationships that affect each other in varying, not-always-obvious ways, all of which have to be understood and kept clearly in focus as I write code. Building this web takes anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes on a project I'm reasonably familiar with, and several times that on one less intimate.

When my concentration is interrupted the web begins to collapse, and if the interruption lasts more than a few seconds or I'm required to think about some other even-slightly-complex thing ("When the server went down last week, what did you tell the customer?"), the web utterly collapses. When the interruption is over I have to build the whole web up again, largely from scratch.

If it takes me 10 minutes to build the web and I'm interrupted for just 2 minutes three times an hour, you need to understand that instead of coding for 50 minutes of the hour I'm only getting 24 minutes of work done. Those 3 tiny interruptions cut my productivity in half.

1
vote

Neil Ford told about it last Devoxx. He wrote a book about it: The productive programmer. He explains tips about 'flow' breakers. If you are in the flow you are at your highest concentration point. But if you get interrupted it takes +-20 minutes to get back in your flow.

You might want to explain em if you get out of your flow you random access memory in your brain loses the data about what your are working and you need 20 minutes to get the data back in you RAM ;)

1
  • Talking about random access and memory loss kind of beats the objective "not to be technical", I think.
    – András Szepesházi
    Feb 11, 2011 at 6:58
0
votes

I usually put the following status on my IM Clients:

I am at work and since I cannot multi-task, please do not bother me...

At least it seems to do the trick with the

long time friend who pings you on Skype every 30 minutes with a "Wazzzzzzup?!"

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  • 1
    You do know that you can go offline or just exit your IM Client, Skype, etc.
    – Spoike
    Feb 10, 2011 at 21:04
  • @Spoike Not if IM is also being used for work, as is common.
    – Eric Wilson
    Mar 7, 2014 at 11:30
  • 1
    @EricWilson Register a different account for use at work, and don't tell the long time friend who pings you on Skype every 30 minutes with a "Wazzzzzzup?!"
    – Daniel Beck
    Mar 9, 2014 at 16:16
  • @EricWilson: If you want to focus on your work for some chunks of time you can still turn off or log off IM/email even if it is used for work. I've been able to do so at the places I've worked at.
    – Spoike
    Mar 16, 2014 at 11:44
0
votes

You could try explaining, but you could also try this:

You interrupt them, while they are doing something that requires deep concentration, whether it is reading, watching a movie, calculating or even better counting something. Then, all you have to explain is that it is exactly like that for you when they interrupt you. Should do the trick. Just please don't bother them while they're driving or something like that :).

2
  • Someone obviously doesn't like my approach to the problem, but sometimes the only way is to explain by example. Especially if the topic is obscure to the people you're explaining it to.
    – Goran Jovic
    Feb 10, 2011 at 15:39
  • It doesn't sound like explaining by example. It sounds like "get your revenge."
    – Marcie
    Feb 10, 2011 at 16:50
0
votes

I don't explain. I kindly inform them that the interruption just added 6 weeks to schedule.

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    This suggestion is along the same lines as "be rude, and people will stop bothering you." It might be effective, but is not a good way to work in a team.
    – Marcie
    Feb 10, 2011 at 16:49
  • I don't believe a "good way to work in a team" was specified as a requirement :) As I understand, the question was directed to interruptions - which may or may not be orthogonal to team membership.
    – Throwback1986
    Mar 13, 2013 at 6:15
0
votes

What I do at the office is find hotdesk spots (hiding spots) in different departments in the office, this way no-one knows where you are and cannot disturb you, but if this is not an option, just get a sign and exlpain that unless it is of vital importance do not disturb!

0
votes

I don't know about the rest but for Skype at least I would suggest using the "Do not disturb" mode. And if you must use it to communicate in work, having a second work-only account that you don't share with anyone you don't want to disturb you at work :)

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0
votes

It doesn't have to be complicated. Something as simple and non-hostile as "I'm working on something that takes a lot of concentration. Can this be put in an email? I promise to look at it as soon as I'm done here."

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