Why Senior Devs Do One Thing at a Time (And You Should Too)

You have a PR open. Slack is pinging. Your manager wants a status update. You're halfway through debugging a gnarly race condition. And somehow you're supposed to do all of it at once. Most developers work this way every single day. And most developers wonder why they feel exhausted but under-accomplished. The answer isn't better tooling or a smarter task manager. It's simpler: do one thing at a time. Context Switching Has a Real Cost There's a reason your IDE warns you about unsaved state. Your brain works the same way. Every time you switch from debugging to Slack to a PR review and back, you're not multitasking. You're reloading. You're paying the cost of context restoration every single time. Studies put this cost at 20+ minutes of recovery per interruption. In a day with five context switches, you may have lost over an hour of deep work before you wrote a single line. The damage compounds. Context switching doesn't just slow you down in the moment. It trains your brain to expect i