An Experiment in Scotch

For me, liv­ing the art life meant a ded­i­ca­tion to painting–a com­plete ded­i­ca­tion to it, mak­ing every­thing else secondary…Bushnell Keeler, the father of my friend Toby, always had this expres­sion: ‘If you want to get one hour of good paint­ing in, you have to have four hours of unin­ter­rupted time.’ And that’s basi­cally true. You don’t just start paint­ing. You have to sit for a while and get some kind of men­tal idea in order to go and make the right moves. David Lynch in Catch­ing The Big Fish

I’ve been read­ing this book by David Lynch and in it, he describes how his prac­tice of med­i­ta­tion has affected his life and work over the past 33 years. I hadn’t got­ten very deep into the book when I ran across the above quote. It fas­ci­nates me how sim­i­lar paint­ing and pro­gram­ming are, at least on an abstract level. The level of con­cen­tra­tion required by both dis­ci­plines is immense and while no one would ever com­mis­sion a paint­ing from an artist and then put him in a room with 40 other artists of vary­ing degrees of abil­ity sep­a­rated only by cubi­cle walls and expect some­thing fan­tas­tic to emerge from his brush, it is rather stan­dard prac­tice to place pro­gram­mers in exactly this same sce­nario only to be com­pletely shocked when the results are not up to snuff.

On top of that, the life of dis­trac­tion that emerges from cubi­cle life is to a great degree addict­ing in that once you begin to allow your atten­tion to be parceled out over 10s or 100s of things, you get to a point where you can no longer actu­ally con­cen­trate on a sin­gle thing for more than sixty sec­onds or so. Hell, just dur­ing the writ­ing of this blog post, I’ve glanced at my email at least 5 times and at least twice thought about sav­ing it and going to do some­thing else. Is it any won­der that pro­gram­mers spit out crappy work almost all the time?

The abil­ity to con­cen­trate is crit­i­cal to suc­cess at both pro­gram­ming and paint­ing. While there cer­tainly appears to be vary­ing lev­els of abil­ity when it comes to con­cen­tra­tion, all peo­ple are neg­a­tively affected by exter­nal inter­rup­tions no mat­ter how good they are at con­cen­trat­ing. Some day, this will become under­stood by a wider audi­ence. In the mean­time, soft­ware will con­tinue to suf­fer as a result of the envi­ron­ment many pro­gram­mers are placed into.