[wbronitsky]

The idea that I can add to the productivity of my team by inserting myself into other people's workstream is pretty thoroughly debunked. Not only would I be working out of context, I would force my coworkers to deal with that lack of context and compensate for it while I'm "helping" them. It also shoves my relatively higher productivity into my teammate's face, which is usually demoralizing.

There are many other reasons that this reasoning is misguided, but I'll leave them for now and instead point you to those smarter and better written than I am.

Luckily, there is a ton of writing on this. I'd start with "The Mythical Man Month" which explains that your reasoning is a fallacy with software engineering: https://archive.org/details/mythicalmanmonth00fred