The Zone Personal Notes6/5/2000; 7:16:21 AM April 19, 2000: Joel on Software Where do these people get their (unoriginal) ideas?: "With programmers, it's especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed."I'm glad I have someone to point to validate myself on this point. Those who do not experience "the zone" consider it half-mystical. (Although many of those who do experience "the zone" consider it fully mystical.) My TTZ (Time To Zone) runs between 10 minutes to half-an-hour, which appears average.What's your TTZ? If you don't know, shouldn't you find out?