The price of commercials is especially high for engineers. And by commercials, I don’t mean an intermission between pieces of a sitcom or drama, I mean the brief 15 seconds of an interruption when someone asks an engineer in the zone a question that takes 3 seconds to answer. For the sake of argument, let’s say an engineer gets interrupted a mere 5 times per day including lunch and a daily meeting (let’s call it a scrum for fun).
If it takes that engineer, admin, developer or whatever 10 minutes to get focused after each interruption and the initial getting into the office and getting into the swing of things; that means that out of an 8 hour day, 1 hour is wasted just refocusing. Refocusing just puts you back on the issue, it doesn’t put you back in the zone. Some engineers only get in the zone once per day. At that rate, you can massively waste someone’s productivity with a 10 second interruption.
What’s my point? Good question. That commercial/question/interruption that someone is pushing onto that engineer could be the straw that broke the camel’s back on a deadline. So be aware of the situation that your people are in, who is talking to them, who has access to them, and who takes advantage of that access. Those precious periods of concentration can afford you a huge win or bring about a big loss.
