Thinking & The Cost of Distraction and Context Switching
Model of Cornish Tin Mines
A few years ago, whilst on holiday in Cornwall, I visited an old Cornish tin mine - it could have been the Geevor tin mine. One thing I remember in particular was that the mines that were dug were deep vertically, and incredibly long horizontally - several miles under the sea 😳! So the miners took hours simply to get to the face of the mine.
Model of Cornish tin mines from https://abandonedminemodels.com/cornwall
Thinking
The model made me think about how I think, in particular why I tend to keep detailed notes. If you're tackling a challenging problem, it's a bit like finding the correct vertical mine shaft to descend into, then working out which horizontal track to follow, and then working all the way to the actual core of the problem at the face of the mine.
Any disruption or distraction then involves your mind zipping all the way back along the horizontal track, up the vertical shaft to the surface. Deal with the disruption/distraction, and then go all the way back down the vertical shaft, along the horizontal track until you're back to where you were - and then you can start work again. Writing notes helps find the route more quickly, but you've still got all that time and effort to go to get back to the core of the problem.
Just a nice model to think about to visualise the risk to time and effort from disruption, distraction and context-switching.