It’s been discussed elsewhere, and I generally agree that programming is an activity that requires substantial time investment before achieving ideal conditions, colloquially known as “the zone”. This kind of condition occurs in other activities as well I imagine, like exercising or sports or games.
So it would seem that the human mind has difficulty juggling too much information at once. While storage capacity seems unlimited (e.g. memories from childhood), our conscious mind has a much smaller finite capacity (e.g. seven digits to a phone number). It also takes time to go retrieve the information so it can be used for the task at hand.
This reasoning suggests to me certain ways of organizing how I do work and other activities. I use instant messaging and email clients that I are inobstrusive when a message comes in, so I can not notice if concentrating, or notice if I’m not busy. Or I listen to familiar music to distract my ears, rather than have them orient on some stray conversation.
Come to think of it, it seems like it’d be worthwhile to have software that can control notification priority of messages. Stuff like, “if it’s from the boss, I want it across my screen” and “if it’s from Joe, let it wait until later if I’m in a meeting”.
I wonder how hard it would be to write a program “smart” enough to do that. After all, we already have programs to spam filtering and rules to do email sorting.
