The Hidden Productivity Trap in an Engineer's Workday
DevOps.com, Wednesday, November 4th, 2026
Meetings and constant interruptions erode developers' deep focus, and AI coding tools make protected focus time more important.
Alex Vakulov writes that meeting load has risen sharply since 2020 and that each interruption resets a ramp-up of about 15 minutes to get into a problem and 45 minutes to reach peak immersion.
He cites Meta research finding engineers had a median of two uninterrupted 90-minute sessions per week, and that suppressing notifications during coding raised daily focus time by 20%.
He recommends agendas, meeting-free blocks, small invite lists, set review periods, rotating triage duty, and pricing meeting hours to show leadership the cost.
He argues AI assistants shift thinking to prompting and reviewing output, which still needs sustained attention.