Personal Time Management and Agile

"What if you’re waiting for that compile or CI build to complete, what do you do? Press Alt+Tab and go read a blog entry or 5 for the next few minutes? It’s easy for that few minutes to turn into 10 or 20. And yet the compile itself only took 3 minutes to complete. That’s a lot of wasted time and a definite mental context switch you have to deal with. Yet watching a compile is mind numbingly dull. So why don’t you think about some refactoring you could apply, or the next test that you could write, or the design for the next task that you’ll get started on next. There’s plenty of non-keyboard activities you can do that keep you focused on the task at hand and not chasing squirrels."

-- Richard Banks