Whilst he was watching the video, his attention was required by other co-workers and random office noise. He was interrupted maybe five times in the 60 minutes of the video, so he took closer to two hours to finish the hour long video. Shortly after that he went for lunch.

Had he been coding, the interruptions would have been there too, but shifting your focus from a creative task and back again requires tremendous amounts of energy, in order to save that precious energy, his brain subconsciously decides to watch a youtube video because it’s easy, instead of coding.

The true cost of a distraction

Before moving on, I want to write a little about the hidden costs of distractions. If someone requires your attention for five minutes, it doesn’t take only five minutes away from your task.

When shifting your attention between contexts (complex coding tasks and distractions), you can lose up to half a day to get back to where you were. Coding is complex, holding complex thoughts takes up a lot of precious energy.

If your work environment fosters distractions (commonly known as “open space”), a grand majority your engineers will be stressed to the bone, and probably doing 10% of what they can actually accomplish.

Going back to our chisel guy: he knows he won’t be able to focus on the task for more than 20 minutes before he’s interrupted, so he doesn’t even start. He instead does something that requires minimal concentration, he distracts himself to avoid the energy draining task of switching contexts.

This shows that 20 minutes into his work day, his brain is already depleted of energy. This energy is precious for creative jobs, without it nothing gets done.