Mind shifting

Programming is, as far as the mind is concerned, a difficult task that requires great concentration. You can't get a beer and continue the work right where you left it when you come back. Maybe construction workers can do that (and I am not saying that their work is any less significant) but you just can't pull that off in programming.
When you are programming something you have a lot of things on your mind like variable names you are currently using, algorithm(s) you have to implement next and what you have already done and what you must do to make something work and stuff like that. Quite a lot of things stored in your short termed memory. And you can get distracted easily in a busy office where everybody is running around and talking to each other.
Once you get distracted it is hard to get back on track, you could spend one hour restarting you work after you have been interrupted for 15 minutes.

And what is even harder is to shift your mind from one project to a different one. It happens almost every day here where I work. Not pleasant, a-a. One minute I'm working on a web application in ASP.NET 2.0 with C#, and then something comes in between and I have to end that and open another project written in ASP.NET 1.1 with VB.NET (or worse something completely different, like Java or PHP).
That's a hard task for your brain. You burn a lot of time switching from one language to another or from one platform to another but you burn even more time switching a whole project that is completely different from the one you ware working on before.
In situations like that I find myself completely unmanageable to do some work done. But I just can't do anything about it, the biggest problem is our way of work around here which simply doesn’t allow us to finish one project and then move to the next one.

What I’m trying to say here is that if you can, avoid this kind of work, finish what you have started to the end of the day, so you don’t have to start somewhere in the middle the next day.
Avtor: Anonymous, objavljeno na portalu SloDug.si (Arhiv)

Leave a comment

Please note that we won't show your email to others, or use it for sending unwanted emails. We will only use it to render your Gravatar image and to validate you as a real person.