[phinze]

In my experience, a day spent pairing, while generally a sort of intense experience, is also filled with little breaks. Your pair gets up to grab a drink; you check your email; somebody turns on a Katy Perry single and you spin around to join a team-wide argument about its merits; etc, etc. :)

While nearly 100% of your time is _dedicated_ to pairing, I'd say the percentage of time you both spend actively sitting at the computer working on a task is roughly equivalent to what you'd do as an individual. Which is to say, it varies. But it never really feels like you can't do side things; the vibe is very flexible and casual.

For deploys and emergencies, it's almost always a pair attacking the problem. Even if just one developer is doing most of the driving, the pair is still able to learn, catch typos, diagnose, etc.

Meetings can definitely end up splitting pairs, which becomes yet another incentive to try to minimize them.