The Day That Eats Itself
The real cost of “just a quick one”
Life in Tech
The Day That Eats Itself
The real cost of “just a quick one”
Photo by Israel Andrade on Unsplash
I get in at 7. I’m not the only one. Half the engineering floor is already here, laptops open, headphones on, racing the clock before the meetings start.
There’s a window before 10.30. No meetings. On paper, it’s mine.
By 10.30, the day no longer belongs to me. It belongs to Slack, to scrums, to whoever walks up next. The strange part is how early I show up hoping to outrun it.
The Interruptions
Slack pings before I’ve finished my coffee. Someone needs something, and it’s quick, they say, but it’s never quick. Every ping costs more than the two minutes it takes to answer because my brain has to drop what it was building and pick up something else entirely. By the time I’ve context-switched back, the window is gone.
We sit in an open office. Anyone can rock up unnanounced, and the noise never fully stops. There’s no door to close, so the only thing I can close is my attention, and even that gets picked at all day.
The Scrum Stack
10.30, team scrum, and straight after, department-wide scrum. That leaves thirty, maybe forty-five minutes before lunch, and I eat at my desk most days. Back on by 1.30 or 2, maybe into another meeting. At 3, a scrum to review whatever’s rolling into production. The day isn’t built in hours. It’s built in fragments between other people’s agendas.
What It’s Costing Me
I’m not switching off when I leave. I carry the day home in my head, replaying tickets, project work and half-developed thoughts I didn’t get to close out properly. This week it’s worse because I’m not sleeping past 3am, and a body running on broken sleep has less to give the moment something else demands it. Context switching is expensive on a good day.
On a week like this, it’s draining me dry.
The Fix
I know what I need. Clarity. One protected hour where nothing gets to interrupt the thing I’m actually trying to finish. I haven’t built that yet. I’m starting tomorrow.
Block the calendar. Close Slack. Let people wait. The work that matters won’t happen in the gaps. It won’t survive the chaos of my day or the vagaries of my mind. I have to carve the time out myself.
That hour isn’t for clearing tickets. It’s for the proof-of-concept projects, the growth areas, the continuous improvement work that never makes it onto the sprint board. In tech, if you’re not learning, you’re dying a slow death. The meetings won’t kill my career.
The stagnation will.
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