That's great until a PM schedules a quick meeting to make sure your progress is tracking their spreadsheet line. And there are 4 or 5 PMs. You end up with your days split into 6 or 7 segments between quick standups and triage meetings and status meetings and emergency customer calls where you're brought in "just in case" and because it takes at least a half hour of concentration just to get back into the zone, your week has passed without you spending any productive time doing hard thinky work. And you can't even explain at the PM's next quick progress meeting that you're behind because her quick status meeting has set you back a week, because to her reporting status at a meeting of 15 people is how things progress.
> [B]ecause it takes at least a half hour of concentration just to get back into the zone, your week has passed without you spending any productive time doing hard thinky work.
And when that half hour itself is semi-routinely[0] interrupted, the whole cycle becomes a form of aversion therapy conditioning you to avoid even attempting to concentrate.
Once you're stuck in that rut, you're really screwed because every failed attempt to break out of the cycle just reinforces it, and not being interrupted just means you're worrying about being interrupted instead.
[0] As with other processes, intermittent reinforcement is far more effective than consistency.
I've had a lot of luck with blocking out a couple hours a day for "dedicated work time." You have to aggressively defend that time and reject requests where someone carelessly double-books you anyway to be able to keep that time sacred. I've worked for places who wouldn't respect that and expected me to be "always available". Those places got the level of output from me that they deserved when I found myself unable to concentrate and would just be waiting for the next interruption.
