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The Conflict of Haphazard Modernism
My life is governed by chaos.
The thought floated through my mind like it has ten thousand times before.
It started, like it usually does, with a “quick question.” I had just slipped into project mode (head down, caffeine up) when a coworker stopped by.
“Do you have two seconds?” he asked.
Spoiler alert: he did not require two seconds.
His desk is maybe 30 feet away with two other desks between us. As we passed the first, another engineer looked up. “Hey, real quick…” You already know where this is going. Five minutes later, we made it to the original guy’s desk — only to be interrupted again by the apprentice who popped in, also “real quick.” Five more minutes. Then one of my employees walked up with her own “quick question,” which turned into a full-on discussion. Then the boss showed up and hijacked all of us for something completely unrelated.
By the time I got back to my desk, the “two second” interruption had cost me 30 minutes (900 times the original estimate from my coworker). I had an hour to work on a project before a string of meetings. That hour was now half. And because the project still needed to be done for one of those meetings, I ended up multitasking through the entire first one — camera off, mic muted, pretending to listen while I…
