Productivity Illusion

[cjsmith]

While I may FEEL more productive if I can't access LJ at work, at the end of the day I'm not sure I'd gotten any more done than on any other day.

Darn. I'd been so hoping I would magically turn into a whirlwind of Super-Coder efficiency. (There's something about working at a startup that makes me desperately want to be superhuman.)

Maybe I have been guilting myself over something that didn't actually make much difference. When I'm working a hard problem, I take breaks. I have to. I rapidly become useless if I don't let my brain shake itself out every so often. Maybe whether those breaks are LJ or not doesn't matter.

Hard to say, this early. I'll give it more time. Maybe this change is merely a small positive thing.

Comments

[eichin.livejournal.com]

and the factor-of-three version is the conservative don't-scare-people-too-much version. I've seen it convincingly quoted as high as a factor of ten - and given some of the programmer interviews I've done, I could probably come up with data for it :-)

Then again, there's another bit of wisdom about measuring productivity, which is that measuring it increases it - because it shows that someone cares. Much more true for "mundane" work, programmers almost always end up treating it as a game...

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I find ten believable too. I figured if I was too lazy to look up a reference to cite, I'd at least quote the conservative number. :-)