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by screamingninja 1306 days ago
> If you do a break you might as well skim through emails and do some reviews.

That's not exactly a break...

1 comments

Well, after or before the break. The point is you're going to lose context completely anyhow.

And I'd like to stress the distribution of the "complexity of a review", which you can crudely approximate with something like number of lines changed. Most of them will be small.

When I'm on a break, I'm pretty much always mulling my task on the back of my mind, and doing things that don't require concentration, so when I get back from the break I'm still largely in the same frame of mind. Doing code reviews definitely forces a sharper shift of mind and takes longer to switch back from than a break does. Sometimes it is worthwhile, but it does have a cost.