Flow - do you speak it?

There's a lot of talk about flow and interruptions in our industry. I think everybody agrees that you don't get much programming done if you don't get into the flow.

But do you?

I've been working as a coder/architect/project manager for a few months at a largish corporation. It's been quite eye-opening.

You arrive at 9:00, have the daily stand-up at 10:00, lunch at 11:45 and a meeting at 14:00. In between there's a couple of people asking you for help. And you get absolutely bugger-all done.

Today I pair-programmed from 14:00 to 17:15. No e-mail, no Skype, no meetings. That was very much an outlier. I was pretty exhausted afterwards too - I guess if I'm not tired after the day I haven't been working that hard.

Every now and then I retire into the test lab or a quiet room or work from home. 5--6 hours of actual coding beats a week in the office.

But if you are living the intended 9:00-17:00 life with those few major interruptions per day - you don't produce squat.