Interruption and the long stretch that real work needs
Fried compares a working day to a night's sleep. Nobody expects to sleep well after being woken every twenty minutes, yet offices schedule exactly that.
How can you expect someone to get a good day’s work if they are interrupted all day?
Jason Fried’s fullest version of this argument is his talk at TEDxMidwest last October, Why work doesn’t happen at work. The line above circulates in several wordings; in the talk he frames it as a comparison with sleep. Sleep has stages, and the deep ones take time to reach. Wake someone every so often and they may spend eight hours in bed without ever resting properly. Work that requires concentration behaves the same way, and a day chopped into fifteen-minute pieces between meetings and taps on the shoulder produces very little of it.
Fried’s targets are specific. He blames managers and meetings more than the usual suspects like social media, because a distraction the worker chooses can be put off, while a meeting called by someone else cannot. His proposed remedies are modest: cancel a meeting, or set aside an afternoon when nobody in the office talks to anyone else.
Programmers recognize the problem immediately. So do writers, designers and anyone doing analysis. Paul Graham made a similar point in an essay about the difference between a maker’s schedule, which runs in half-day blocks, and a manager’s, which runs in hours. A single meeting in the middle of the afternoon can ruin the whole afternoon for the maker. Estimates of how long it takes to regain concentration after a break vary, and the exact figure matters less than the pattern most people recognize: the interruption takes two minutes, and getting back into the problem takes far longer. A day with ten of them may contain no stretch long enough for the hardest part of the job.
The argument does not fit every job. For a support agent, a salesperson or someone running operations, interruptions are the work. The customer calls when the customer calls. In a very young startup, quick questions across a table are also how a small team stays in sync without formal process, and walling everyone off can let misunderstandings run for days.
The practical answer is to separate kinds of time. Protect long stretches for the people and tasks that need them, batch the meetings, and keep a clear channel for the interruptions that genuinely cannot wait. Interruptions will still happen; the gain is in deciding when.