Productivity

It's no secret to anybody who works with me that I hate interruptions. However, it's often been difficult to explain to people just how disruptive their interruptions are to my day. After all, if somebody doesn't know how to change permissions on a file on our Linux servers, they could either spend 1 minute asking me or spend half an hour figuring it out themselves. Obviously they should just ask me, right? Finally, I've stumbled across an article by Joel Spolsky describing just what the problem is. If only I'd had this link available a year or two ago, when I used to actually answer email, the phone, and instant messages. My productivity got so pathetically low that I realized something had to drastically change. So I started ignoring people (as much as possible) from 9 to 5. For the most part, I'm now a happily productive programmer again. Which brings me to my next point...

If you're wondering why your email to me goes unanswered for days or weeks, or if you wonder why I work on your project for two months, only to ignore you entirely for the next two months while I work with another client, Spolsky's got the answer (again).

I've read Spolsky's blog a few times before, and while I generally find myself disagreeing with him on technical matters, I find that he is strikingly insightful when it comes to running a software company.