This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Vijay Kumar
A developer’s story, a tough realization, and why we built LogTaskr.
As developers, we love to believe our biggest enemy is complexity.
Or legacy code.
Or that one service nobody wants to touch.
But the real enemy is quieter.
It sneaks in through Slack pings.
Ends up in “quick syncs.”
Lives inside Jira boards with 19 tabs open.
And kills your focus one tiny interruption at a time.
I didn’t understand this until the day I tracked my own time.
The Moment Everything Broke Down
I started my morning like any other dev:
Laptop open, brain ready, coffee strong.
I planned to ship a feature by lunch.
Instead, here’s what actually happened:
- 12m reviewing a PR
- 7m seeing a Slack message
- 4m checking an error in logs
- 3m going back to Slack
- 14m lost because of context switching
- 9m in a “quick” meeting
- 6m scrolling GitHub issues
- 20m chasing a bug that wasn’t even mine
By the time I returned to my feature…
I had to rebuild the entire mental model from scratch.
That’s the hidden cost devs never talk about.
You don’t just lose minutes — you lose flow state, the only place real engineering happens.
And the worst part?
I believed I was “busy.”
But I wasn’t productive.
I was reacting.
The uncomfortable truth
Ask any developer what they worked on today.
They’ll tell you.
Ask them how much time each task took…
Silence.
We’re brilliant at estimating systems.
Terrible at estimating ourselves.
That’s when it clicked:
If I can’t measure where my time goes, I can’t improve it.
If I can’t see my distractions, I can’t eliminate them.
This wasn’t a productivity problem.
It was an observability problem.
And developers love observability.
Just never for themselves.
So we built LogTaskr — an observability tool for your day.
Not another productivity app.
Not another planner.
Not another “build discipline” tool.
It’s simply this:
👉 Track what you do.
👉 See where your time leaks.
👉 Optimize your workflow like you optimize code.
When I saw my first report, it was brutal.
But it was also freeing.
Because once you see the patterns, you can fix them:
- Remove meetings that kill flow
- Batch shallow tasks
- Protect deep work windows
- Reduce context switching
- Catch invisible distractions before they stack
Devs optimize everything.
Servers. Queries. Pipelines. Systems.
But never themselves.
LogTaskr fixes that.
If you’ve ever wondered why your 8-hour day feels like 2 hours…
It’s not you.
It’s your workflow.
And you can finally see it.
🔗 Try LogTaskr free: Try Logtaksr
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Vijay Kumar
Vijay Kumar | Sciencx (2025-11-16T05:25:54+00:00) The Day I Realized I Wasn’t Coding — I Was Just Context Switching to Death.. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/11/16/the-day-i-realized-i-wasnt-coding-i-was-just-context-switching-to-death/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.