[simonh]

Not a doctor either, just going on articles I've read on this. The sort of multitasking that causes those problems is when both tasks need frequent attention. If you can essentially leave a task alone for several hours, with some sort of notification if there's a problem, that's fine. Even things that don't take much attention but are ongoing tasks, like doing the ironing, are fine depending what else you're combining it with.

[defer]

This resonates. I usually wrap my long running commands in something that sends a push notification when they finish so that I don't jump around seeing if things completed or failed. I find the distraction of the push notification less disrupting than continually checking for completeness.

[jfoutz]

osx comes with a command "say" which is a text to speech tool. I'd do things like make && say "build complete" || say "compile failed" with different voices I thought were funny. generally worked great.

One day, I stepped away and had a particularly intimidating voice say "your build has failed" and apparently knocked out my headphones. I came back just in time to hear that, and see a couple coworkers jump at the sound.

After that, I was much more consistent at disabling sound when I stepped away. I got a little teasing about that day, but generally it worked great.

[scns]

This is possible in Linux as well. The program is called speech-ng IIRC.

[boogies]

espeak-ng / espeak. But notify-send(1) mitigates the potential for scaring your coworkers.

[mrlemke]

I use espeak and it works on Termux too.

[defer]

I used a similar approach before working mostly remote, now I just curl to pushbullet to get the notification wherever I might be working.

[spoiler]

This is actually a great idea. I've used from-cli-notifications for things that I knew would take hours, but for coding related stuff I always think "it's not that long." So, I would immediately go into "active attention multi-tasking" and then recheck if the compilation tab finished, and then decide from there where to shift my active attention, without giving it some breathing room.

Lately I've actively tried not to do that (it's a hard habit to break, and I still feel guilt sometimes), though.

[spoiler]

This makes sense about moving your active attention to different object(ive)s. I think I slowly stopped doing "active" multitasking and switched to this low-attention multi-tasking once my burn-out got worse. FWIW: I don't think multi-tasking on its own caused the burn-out either, it was a combination of a few things probably.