Attention Span
Saturday, October 27th, 2007 Editor’s Note: I wrote the title to this post and was surprised a few hours later when I found the window again. Perfect
I’ve noticed in recent years that my attention span has become pretty short. It may have started when I was a ground beef covered near-slave at Taco Bell, where working on the drive through is an experience that will shred, pulp, and reconsitute your psyche into something completely alien. After a few nights of that, I could routinely maintain multiple conversations while parsing an order and answering ridiculous questons like “Does your sauce have sugar in it?” (I actually got that question during the Summer of Atkins)
College is an experiment in doing a fuckton at once. Keeping track of a myraid of facts, assignments, meetings, appointments to drink, and whether or not the class you’re going to have next has moved to a different building or not is only the start. I lived 60 hour weeks in college, thrived (throve?) on 5 hours of sleep per night, and got grades consistent with the only GPA I’ve ever received, a 3.8. The amount of tasks I accomplished concurrently still blows my mind. How did I manage to work on a web site, take notes, surf the web, chat with Isha, and eat at the same time in class?
My last job, as a Tech Support slave, was maddening. I’d have a list of 10 things to do concurrently and be constantly interrupted with people asking me for advice on cameras, or printers, or types of burnable DVDs. It was the perpetual switching that really made my brain hurt. Suffice to say, I didn’t make nearly enough, and a less lazy person would have quit and found a job that paid quadruple.
The reason for this post is that I find that, while doing anything, if there’s a lull longer than two counts, my eyes are gone. They’ve ticked off to some completely different topic. As a developer, my day includes lots of lulls. Compile, wait, load test site, wait, click some options, wait. It’s these waiting times that I find that if I don’t have something queued up to focus my attention on, I’m lost, my brain slows down, and my productivity tanks. My day thrives on a constant influx of timely <i>stuff</i>. It’s hard to measure productivity, but it’s pretty easy to guage a lot of the stuff around it, like how zombified I am after a day of work, or how exhausted or angry I feel. Without any kind of scientific measurments, I feel like the closer to 100% my brain is engaged during a given day while minimizing too much focus flipping, the better I feel.
For example, if I can just sit down, and focus on one thing without the development toosl getting in my way, I walk out the door feeling pretty good. I race home, and get some of my personal work done. But, if I’m doing a ton of tweaking and testing, with long compiles, and tedious testing, when I walk out the door, all I can think about is just checking out and going to bed. The boring stuff is part of being a developer, for sure. The tools are a tradeoff, and I’m not complaining.
So, part the road I’ll walk for the rest of my life is to become a better developer. A part of that will be practice, like anything else, but another part will be amping up my productivity until I’ve written 50 lines of code before I’m out of bed.