If you like the ground covered in this book and would like to dive deeper, here’s a full list of the other resources that helped bring this to life. While many of these weren’t used or quoted directly, they all contributed to a deeper understanding of productivity in software development, how our brains work, and how we can improve focus and productivity.

Books

Papers & Presentations

  • Interrupts: Just a Minute Never Is. IEEE Software, vol. 15 (5) pp. 97-103. 10.1109/52.714843
  • Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol. 109 (2) pp. 168-181. 10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002
  • Preparing to resume an interrupted task: effects of prospective goal encoding and retrospective rehearsal. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, vol. 58 (5) pp. 583-603. 10.1016/S1071-5819(03)00023-5
  • Need for Sleep: the Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, pp. 1-20. 10.5665/sleep.4174
  • The Effects of Alcohol on Quality of Sleep. Korean Journal of Family Medicine, vol. 36 (6) pp. 294-299. 10.4082/kjfm.2015.36.6.294
  • Mild hypohydration increases the frequency of driver errors during a prolonged, monotonous driving task. Physiology & Behavior, vol. 147 pp. 313-318. 10.1016/j.physbeh.2015.04.028
  • The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review, vol. 100 (3) pp. 363-406. 10.1037//0033-295X.100.3.363
  • The cost of interrupted work. More speed and stress. CHI '08, Florence, Italy, pp. 107-110. 10.1145/1357054.1357072
  • Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 40 (4) pp. 1142-1152. 10.1037/a0036577
  • Exercise holds immediate benefits for affect and cognition in younger and older adults. Psychology and Aging, vol. 28 (2) pp. 587-594. 10.1037/a0032634
  • Associations of Cognitive Function Scores with Carbon Dioxide, Ventilation, and Volatile Organic Compound Exposures in Office Workers: A Controlled Exposure Study of Green and Conventional Office Environments. Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 124 (6) pp. 805-812. 10.1289/ehp.1510037
  • The Work Life of Developers: Activities, Switches and Perceived Productivity. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 43 (12) pp. 1178-1193. 10.1109/TSE.2017.2656886
  • Resumption strategies for interrupted programming tasks. Software Quality Journal, vol. 19 (1) pp. 5-34. 10.1007/s11219-010-9104-9
  • On reconstruction of task context after interruption. CHI '10, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, pp. 89-92. 10.1145/1753326.1753341
  • Notifications and Awareness: A Field Study of Alert Usage and Preferences. Computer-supported Cooperative Work, pp. 27-30. 10.1145/1718918.1718926
  • Why do I keep interrupting myself? Environment, habit and self-interruption. CHI '11, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, pp. 3127-3130. 10.1145/1978942.1979405
  • Breakfast consumption and cognitive function in adolescent schoolchildren. Physiology & Behavior, vol. 103 (5) pp. 431-439. 10.1016/j.physbeh.2011.03.018
  • Supplemental Material for The Relative Benefits of Green Versus Lean Office Space: Three Field Experiments. Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied, vol. 20 (3) 10.1037/xap0000024
  • Effect of breakfast composition on cognitive processes in elementary school children. Physiology & Behavior, vol. 85 (5) pp. 635-645. 10.1016/j.physbeh.2005.06.023
  • Unhappy Developers: Bad for Themselves, Bad for Process, and Bad for Software Product. 2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE-C), Buenos Aires, Argentina, pp. 362-364. 10.1109/ICSE-C.2017.104
  • Programmer, interrupted. 2013 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), San Jose, CA, USA, pp. 171-172. 10.1109/VLHCC.2013.6645270
  • Feeding the brain: the importance of nutrients for brain functions and health. Progress in Nutrition, vol. 19 (3) pp. 1-5. 10.23751/pn.v19i3.4821
  • Work Interrupted: A Closer Look at the Role of Interruptions in Organizational Life. The Academy of Management Review, vol. 28 (3) pp. 494-507. 10.2307/30040736
  • Task Interruption in Software Development Projects. What Makes some Interruptions More Disruptive than Others? EASE '18 Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering 2018, Christchurch, New Zealand, pp. 122-132. 10.1145/3210459.3210471
  • No task left behind? Examining the nature of fragmented work. CHI '05 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Portland, Oregon, USA, pp. 321-330. 10.1145/1054972.1055017