Interrupting Flow
After a certain Hackaton, a survey was sent over to me to give my thoughts about it. See, the management thought it was great and that they’d like to do more of these hackatons moving forward. My vision was different, as I was constantly interrupted to the point where I had to go watch a tree being planted rather than doing actual work.
Constant Meetings
Context switching is one of the biggest Productivity killers.
In a world where reporting the status of a task seems more important than actually doing the work, the constant meeting scheduled to talk about the problem rather than fixing the problem seems to be the biggest problems.^[https://betterprogramming.pub/too-many-meetings-at-work-heres-how-to-stop-the-meeting-madness-9565a23aaa9b]
Good Project Managers don’t make you go through it and instead at understanding and utilize the daily stand up for these updates.
Endless Demos
Agile would enforce a Feature to be ready by the end of each sprint. That would also of course include the usual bi-weekly Sprint Demos (God knows I have a lot of those going on). Sprint demos are a great way to interrupt the flow of development. You have to pause completely the work on a feature most times, even tho it’s in it’s final stages, just so you can do a demo to people who are not interested, by people who don’t want to give it.
Context Switching
Being involved in multiple projects always results in a significant hit to productivity.
I consider myself pretty good at multitasking and project switching, however there will always be a productivity decrease when handling too many things.
Even the best programmers I know struggle with this.