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Programmers want flow. when programming, light turns RED

I read Reducing Interruptions at Work: A Large-Scale Field Study of FlowLight and built my own FlowLight. When I first heard about this paper from the second author, Chris Corley, he said something to the effect of “the easiest way to detect if a programmer is in flow is to see if they’re typing into their programmer’s editor.” This is the approach I wanted to implement.

If you are doing the thing, and someone bumps into you and asks if you want coffee, this can lead to an extra fifteen minutes spent reloading short term memory. My friend Chris Corley told me about the FlowLight paper right after it was written, hopefully this post lets me put stop thinking about it for awhile. On the good side, my MagTag board already has a case with an attached battery, and its own set of magnet feet, so I can stick it on the wall for anyone to see.

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