(^40) 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know
Provide Regular Time to Focus
James Leigh
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
SoFTWARE DEvEloPERS REgUlARly REPoRT that interruptions such as
meetings, demos, and urgent bug fixes keep them from completing their work.
Typically, a person takes about 20 minutes to regain his train of thought after
one of these interruptions. A 5-minute question actually costs 25 minutes, and
a quick 10-minute meeting actually costs 30 minutes of potential work. Inter-
ruptions and recovery time consume 28% of a typical knowledge worker’s day
and can cause undue frustration and stress.
To help address this issue, set aside two hours a day (for example, between
10:00 a.m. and noon) that are interruption free. Alternately, you may be able
to plan an entire day when no meetings, questions, email, phones, and other
distractions are permitted, to allow developers to concentrate and focus on
their work. Intel and IBM set aside Fridays, calling them “zero-email Fridays”
and “Think Fridays,” respectively.
It is equally important that developers know what their top two priorities are so
they can plan their work for this period effectively. Even the best-intentioned
developers could only randomly guess at what these are if they’re not explicitly
told what will bring real business value to the project.
Infomania (a debilitating state of information overload) is widely recognized
as a major opponent to a developer’s productivity. Programming requires
that developers keep many things in their heads at once—everything from
variables, class structures, APIs (application programming interfaces), utility
methods, and even directory hierarchies. When a developer is interrupted,