Chapter 7. Task Switching Costs for Developers

In this chapter, I'm going to discuss the concept of task switching costs. Task switching, commonly referred to as multitasking, can be detrimental to your performance as a developer and can even lead to errors in your projects. Our world has changed dramatically over the past decade, whether for good or bad is not a topic we'll discuss in this chapter. However, one thing is sure: we are constantly bombarded with distractions.

As I was researching this chapter, I received over a dozen emails, 7 Snapchat messages, 30 notifications on Instagram, 7 Twitter notifications, 5 Skype instant messages, and surprisingly only 9 text messages. If you were counting, that's around 72 various notifications that were pushed to me in the past two hours. Beyond that, I researched this chapter at a coffee shop filled with potential distractions.

So exactly how bad are distractions? Research from Gloria Mark (https://www.fastcompany.com/944128/worker-interrupted-cost-task-switching), who is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the UC Irvine, shows that it takes, on average, 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get fully back on task after being distracted. That's a very, very bad thing when it comes to productivity; however, I've seen it myself, I've lost track of how many times I'll be in the middle of a development project and receive an email on a completely unrelated matter and instead of ignoring it and continuing to work I'll read it and then spend time working on another task before returning to the project.

This may not sound like a major issue, except that when I come back to the project, I don't pick up from where I left off. Instead I have to re-familiarize myself with what I was working on the moment that I was distracted. If the problem was complex, it may take me even longer than the 23 minutes in order to get back in the zone and working on the project.

So, in a world filled with emails and social media distractions, how can anyone get any real work done? After reading Cal Newport's book Deep Work, I started to put together some practical ways that I can work efficiently and still stay in touch with the world.