Time the loop you are really in.
Save the file.
Run the thing.
Find out whether you were right.
For a great many people
that round trip is
a little over two minutes.
Too long to sit and watch it.
Far too short to start anything.
So you fill it.
The inbox. The channel.
The review somebody tagged you on.
The thread about next quarter
that does not need you.
Then the run finishes
and you come back
as a slightly different person,
holding a slightly different problem,
and you spend the next half minute
remembering what you were testing
and why.
Do that thirty times in a day
and you have not been interrupted once.
Nobody came to your desk.
You chose every one of those detours.
And the day still went
the way an interrupted day goes,
because the gap was there,
thirty times,
and a gap that length
has no good uses.
This is where the conversation
about discipline goes wrong.
You are not weak for filling it.
You built a rhythm
in which stopping is compulsory,
at an interval your tooling picked,
and then asked yourself
to have the strength
to stand still inside it,
thirty times, every day.
So work on the loop,
not on the willpower.
Find out what the number is.
Not what you assume it is.
Measure it on the machine
you actually use.
Then treat it as a defect,
because it is the most expensive one
you own.
Run the single test, not the suite.
Keep the process alive
between attempts.
Stop rebuilding
what did not change.
And where the wait genuinely
cannot be shortened,
give it one job and only one.
Stand up. Look at something far away.
Write the next line of the note
about what you are trying
and what you expect to see.
Anything that hands you back
the same thought
that you were holding
when you pressed the key.
A good day is not measured
by the hours you sat there.
It is measured by how often
you got to ask a question
and hear the answer
while the question
was still yours.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
