All right, we got a question here from Steven. Steven says, "Hi Cal, I'm a software engineer and I struggle to stay focused anytime I have to wait for something to happen. For example, I may be waiting on a test suite to run or PR checks to pass or a service to start up.

And these can take anywhere from two to 10 minutes. Is it okay to context switch these scenarios? And if not, what should I do with my attention given my next action will be dependent on the outcome of whatever I'm waiting for?" Steven, I hear this a lot from developers.

They have all these pauses. Yeah, when you're waiting for a compile or for your for your checks to complete. From a context switching perspective, there's two extremes that you should stick towards here. Very, very related activities are very, very unrelated activities. Don't go in the middle. So by very related activities, I'm working on this code.

I'm running these checks on that. It's going to take four minutes. All right, during that four minutes, I'm looking at similar code. The next thing I'm going to test or I'm going back and trying to clean up some code I just wrote. So you stay, you're staying entirely within the context of the thing you're working on.

That will minimize the context switching overhead because you're keeping most of the context the same. The other option is to go way far away from work altogether. So you say I need to go check Jesse Rogers Twitter account to see how the player union management MLB union discussions are going today.

And are we getting closer to an agreement on the collective bargaining? Actually, their issue is with the competitive balance tax. Let's see what's going on there. That's so different from your work. But yes, it's a context shift, but it's not going to have nearly the same capture effect as something that's work related, but different than what you're doing.

So what is this work related but different what you're doing? What's the middle of the spectrum that's going to kill you? That's going to be things like email. Let me go look at other work related stuff, expose myself to questions. I need to answer responsibilities being put on my plate stuff that people need for me, but I can't respond to all of them right now and then turn my attention back to what I'm doing.

That gray zone is what's killer. That gray zone. If you look at an email inbox, I'm seeing work stuff, but not super related to exactly what I'm doing is what's going to give you 20 minutes of sluggishness until you get your mind locked back in. That's the gray zone that if you keep going to it again and again throughout the morning by 2 p.m.

You're done because that's a that's a painful context shift. So either stick with what very close to what you're doing or go very far away from what you're doing. But don't go in somewhere in between so unrelated work stuff email is killer. Social media is killer. If it's emotionally arousing, that's also a problem.

So I'll put that as a caveat. Don't look at information about the war the Ukraine during your five-minute check. That's also going to be quite diverting. So nothing emotionally arousing nothing is related but not exactly related to what you're doing and it's the best you can do. Thank you.