Real Work vs. Fake Work

Imagine you have a free hour to tackle some work. It takes about 15 minutes to gather your thoughts, locate the relevant code section, and initiate a build to ensure a solid starting point. While the build runs, you decide to check your email.

You scan your messages and respond to one. Returning to your build, you discover it failed because you hadn't pulled in recent changes. You pull those changes and restart the build. Then, a colleague messages you on Slack. After chatting for a while, it's time for a meeting. You notice the build has failed again.

How much work did you accomplish?

While I used a coding example, this scenario applies equally to writing documents, preparing presentations, managing accounts, or any other knowledge work you do.

In my opinion, you've completed zero hours of real work and one hour of "fake work." Although you spent an hour on work-related tasks, nothing valuable was created because your focus was divided. Substantial work can't be done in 15-minute increme…