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Fragmented thinking is a bigger threat to flow state than interruptions


What I learned after reading 14 studies about flow state

Surely, there are good reasons to interrupt—high-priority bugs, important calibration meetings, a fire in the building—but it otherwise seemed obvious to me that companies and development teams should work toward optimizing away from distraction and toward focus. But the more I read the research and the more I talked to developers, the more I felt our watered-down definition of flow state leaves us without a lot of the richness that made the concept so popular in the first place. The greatest threat isn’t an external interruption but an internal fragmentation—developers allowing themselves to suspend flow state in favor of important but ultimately distracting tasks.

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