I feel in turn that this comment is the dismissive one, and in fact extremely so.
The issue is not that programmers need to focus, is that they need to focus on deep, complex work. At least a few of those other tasks you mention (don’t have much experience with sales copy, and in rather terrible with both sales and copy) do require focus but have smaller reasonable increments of progress.
Stop thinking about the workplace for a moment and think more broadly of tasks throughout the entire day. Some of those are more easily put down and returned to than others.
Some examples of tasks which require focus but interrupt well: formatting meeting notes into minutes, simple accounting (paying bills, reconciling a ledger). The main point with these are that the individual units of work are small, and don’t generally require a lot of mental preloading to begin/resume working on. So if I am interrupted it can be irritating but I don’t really lose much.
Programming generally involves a lot of mental state that needs to be preloaded, and the Subtask units are often not small. That’s all.
Regarding the insinuation that this “myth” is the result of coddling at the professional level: if this were true, then non-professionals would not discover this independently for themselves…
The issue is not that programmers need to focus, is that they need to focus on deep, complex work. At least a few of those other tasks you mention (don’t have much experience with sales copy, and in rather terrible with both sales and copy) do require focus but have smaller reasonable increments of progress.
Stop thinking about the workplace for a moment and think more broadly of tasks throughout the entire day. Some of those are more easily put down and returned to than others.
Some examples of tasks which require focus but interrupt well: formatting meeting notes into minutes, simple accounting (paying bills, reconciling a ledger). The main point with these are that the individual units of work are small, and don’t generally require a lot of mental preloading to begin/resume working on. So if I am interrupted it can be irritating but I don’t really lose much.
Programming generally involves a lot of mental state that needs to be preloaded, and the Subtask units are often not small. That’s all.
Regarding the insinuation that this “myth” is the result of coddling at the professional level: if this were true, then non-professionals would not discover this independently for themselves…