Jan Chong is a doctoral candidate at Stanford, studying Organizational Behavior. Jan has two CS degrees, so it’s natural that she would combines her interest in software development and organizational behavior by studying XP teams. She presented some of her preliminary findings at Agile 2005.

One of the things that Jan observed while doing her research is that programmers working in pairs are interrupted regularly. That makes sense. The highly collaborative nature of XP increases work-related interruptions. Moreover, pairing means there’s twice the probability of being interrupted. Fortunately, working in pairs also makes it easier to refocus.

But the big surprise for me in Jan’s report was the observation that programmers working alone created interruptions for themselves. Here’s how Jan described one non-XP, non-pairing programmer:

“…Ian has few external interruptions, which gives him the opportunity to devote long stretches of uninterrupted attention to his primary work task. Instead, however, we find that Ian’s session is filled with points at which he turns his attention away from his primary work task without any external impetus. Ian’s session alternates between engagement in periods of focused work and sustained periods of social conversation or other activities unrelated to work.”

Be honest. Do you ever create distractions for yourself? I do. All the time. And apparently I’m not alone.

My distractions are usually work-related. “I should check my mail,” I think. Or “I’d better look up how to…,” But these short diversions often devolve into, well, goofing off. The next thing I know one quick query on Google has turned into two hours of romping through interesting technology-related articles that have nothing to do with the problem at hand.

Reflecting on Jan’s observation helped me recognize a pattern: I’m particularly prone to these self-generated distractions when working on large, complex tasks. And Jan’s observations of Ian increases my suspicion that creating distractions is a common coping mechanism. (That would certainly help explain the wild success of You Tube.)

So if self-generated distractions provide a way of coping with big, boring, or complex tasks, the cure would be to make tasks small, interesting, and straightforward.

Sure enough, I notice that I’m better at sticking to the task at hand when I take small steps with clear completion criteria. For example, if working on my website, I’ll work on one image, text for one page, or one style at a time. The more I try to do at once, the more tempted I am to create a distraction. Distractions provide a mental break. I feel less overwhelmed, and thus less easily distracted, when working in small, well-defined increments. (You might note a similarity here with TDD, yet another way in which XP supports a high degree of productivity.)

Aha! That means being easily distracted isn’t a sign of personal weakness; it’s an indication that I need to redefine or reorganize my work, take smaller steps, and begin with the end in mind.

I can do that. Right after I check out what’s new on Reddit.com.