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A few interruptions ruin the day
Paul Graham's split between maker and manager schedules rests on this. A 45-minute block of time is not enough to attack a hard problem, while four hours is. DHH's programming career took off once he could close his door and see no one for long stretches. In the open offices where he started, his productivity and creativity went flat, and he was exhausted by having people around.
The same logic shapes how 37signals is built. It works remotely with about 60 people, who meet for a week twice a year. That week is enough to reestablish trust and charge the batteries, and then the work returns to uninterrupted solitude.
Why does interruption cost so much focus?
Gloria Mark, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, has reported that office workers took about 23 minutes on average to return to a task after an interruption. Along the way they often handled other tasks first. Her team also found that interrupted workers worked faster and reported more stress and frustration. The work was published in 2008 under the title The Cost of Interrupted Work.
What did open offices do to face-to-face contact?
In a 2018 study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Harvard researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban tracked employees at a Fortune 500 company that moved to an open-plan layout. Face-to-face interaction fell by about 70 percent after the move. Electronic messages rose. Workers appeared to withdraw from the open space instead of talking more.
Why do meetings hurt makers more?
Paul Graham described the difference in a 2009 essay called Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule. A manager's day is cut into one-hour slots, and a meeting just fills one of them. A maker needs blocks of at least half a day, so a single meeting in the afternoon can split it into two pieces, each too short for hard work. Graham's essay was written for people who run startups and manage programmers.
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