I Work Faster Alone

Here's the truth nobody in tech wants to admit: decades of evidence tell me I work faster alone. According to UC Irvine research, workers are interrupted every 11 minutes and take 23 minutes to recover focus - that's 5 hours of recovery time burned daily. I've done pair programming, mob programming, and open office collaboration. Most of it was friction disguised as teamwork.

The logic is sound on paper.

This isn't a popular opinion. The industry has decided collaboration is always good. More communication is always better. Pair programming produces better code. Open offices foster innovation. I've tried all of it. For me, it's mostly friction.

The Collaboration Industrial Complex

Modern software development has an obsession with togetherness:

Pair programming. Two engineers, one keyboard, supposedly better code. In practice: one person types while the other checks their phone. Or two people argue about naming conventions while the actual problem goes unsolved.

Mob programming. The whole team watches one person type. I've seen this produce good results exactly once. It took four engineers an entire day to write what one focused engineer could have done in two hours.

Open offices. No walls, no privacy, no focus. Designed by extroverts who mistake noise for productivity. A Harvard study published in Royal Society journals found face-to-face interaction actually decreased 70% in open offices - the opposite of the intended collaborative effect. Yet they persist because they're cheap and look collaborative.

Daily standups. Fifteen minutes that somehow take forty-five. People performing progress rather than making it. By the time the meeting ends, you've lost the thread of what you were working on. It's part of the cargo cult of Agile. Rituals mistaken for productivity.

Slack/Teams always on. Constant interruption disguised as communication. Every notification is someone else's priority becoming your emergency.

The assumption behind all of this: more interaction equals better outcomes. My experience says otherwise.

What Actually Happens When I'm Alone

When I work solo, something different happens:

I hold the whole problem in my head. Complex systems require loading context. Every interruption dumps that context. Alone, I can build a mental model in two hours, then solve the problem in twenty minutes. With interruptions, I spend the whole day reloading context. I never reach the solution.

I make decisions faster. No consensus needed. No explaining my reasoning. No defending choices to people who haven't loaded the same context. I see the problem, pick an approach, and implement it. If it's wrong, I find out fast and fix it.

I don't context switch. Collaboration means constant switching between your work and other people's questions, concerns, and suggestions. Solo work means staying in one problem until it's solved.

I write code that fits in my head. With others, there's pressure to make code "readable" in ways that add complexity. More abstraction. More indirection. More "flexibility" for hypothetical futures. Alone, I write code that solves the actual problem simply.

I ship. At the end of a solo day, I have working code. At the end of a collaborative day, I often have meeting notes and unresolved discussions. This is why meetings are bugs, not features.

The Zone Is Real

Every programmer knows the zone. That state where you're fully loaded into a problem. The code flows. Time disappears. You look up and three hours have passed. It felt like twenty minutes. You've written more in that stretch than in the previous two days combined.

The zone isn't mystical. It's a well-documented psychological state called "flow." It requires specific conditions. Clear goals. Immediate feedback. A balance between challenge and skill. But it also requires something that gets less attention: uninterrupted time.

Getting into the zone takes time. You load the problem into working memory. Understand the data structures. Remember what you tried yesterday. See the shape of the solution. As Cal Newport's research on deep work demonstrates, this loading process takes 15 to 30 minutes minimum. Often longer for complex systems.

Once you're in the zone, you're operating at peak capacity. Problems that seemed hard become tractable. You see connections you couldn't see before. The code writes itself because you're holding the whole system in your head.

Then someone taps your shoulder. Or pings you on Slack. Or pulls you into a "quick sync." The zone shatters. The mental model collapses. The context dumps. You're back to zero. You need another 20 minutes just to get back to where you were. If you can get back at all.

The zone is fragile. It's also where all the hard work happens. Every interruption for a question they could have emailed costs more than five minutes. It costs the hour needed to rebuild your mental state.

When I work alone, I can stay in the zone for hours. When I work collaboratively, I never get there at all.

The Context Switching Tax

The research on context switching is clear. It takes 15-25 minutes to regain focus after an interruption. In a typical collaborative environment, interruptions happen every 11 minutes on average. The math doesn't work.

Let's say you have an 8-hour day. With interruptions every 11 minutes, you never reach deep focus. You spend the entire day in shallow work mode. Handling small tasks and responding to others. Nothing complex gets done.

Now take that same day with no interruptions. You load context for 30 minutes, work in deep focus for 3 hours, take a break, then do it again. You get 6 hours of deep work. That's where hard problems get solved.

Collaboration optimizes for the appearance of communication. Solo work optimizes for actual output.

But What About Code Review?

The best argument for collaboration is that more eyes catch more bugs. This is true, to a point. Code review matters. I'm not against other people ever looking at my code.

But code review is asynchronous. I write the code alone, uninterrupted. Then someone reviews it later, also uninterrupted. We're both in focus mode. Comments go back and forth until we converge. This is collaboration that respects deep work. It's why traditional code review is broken—the synchronous version destroys the very focus it needs to be effective.

What doesn't work: someone looking over my shoulder while I write. Asking questions about every decision. Suggesting changes before I've finished the thought. That's not review. That's interruption with extra steps.

The distinction matters. Asynchronous collaboration respects focus. Synchronous collaboration destroys it.

When Collaboration Actually Helps

I'm not saying collaboration is always wrong. It has its place:

Knowledge transfer. When someone needs to learn a system, pairing can accelerate that. The senior engineer explains while the junior engineer absorbs. This is teaching. Not collaborative coding.

Design discussions. Before writing code, talking through approaches can surface better ideas. But this should be a short meeting. Not an ongoing conversation while coding.

Debugging the impossible. When you've been stuck for hours and can't see the problem, a fresh pair of eyes helps. This is occasional. Not constant.

Onboarding. New team members need context they can't get from docs alone. Spending time with them early pays off later.

Notice the pattern. These are discrete events, not continuous states. Collaborate when necessary, then go back to focused solo work.

The Introvert Tax

Here's something the industry doesn't talk about. The collaboration-heavy workplace is designed for extroverts. People who gain energy from interaction. People who think out loud. People who feel lonely working alone.

For introverts, the modern office is exhausting. Every interaction costs energy. Open offices mean constant social performance. Meetings drain the battery. By the time you find a quiet moment to actually code, you're too tired to focus. This constant drain is a recipe for burnout. Especially for founders who can't escape the collaboration theater.

This isn't weakness. It's brain chemistry. Introverts process information differently. We need solitude to think deeply. The collaboration-obsessed workplace doesn't accommodate this. It assumes everyone works the same way.

I'm an introvert. I've always been one. Pretending otherwise doesn't change the wiring. I do my best work alone because that's how my brain works. The industry should make room for that. Instead of insisting I perform collaboration I don't need.

Remote Work Showed the Truth

The pandemic forced remote work on everyone. Suddenly, knowledge workers were home, alone, with their problems and their code. The collaboration-industrial complex predicted disaster.

What actually happened? For many of us, productivity went up. We weren't spending energy commuting, performing in open offices, or sitting in meetings. We were just working. Tasks that always felt impossible suddenly got done. We had uninterrupted time to do them.

Some people struggled. The extroverts who needed office energy. The junior engineers who needed mentorship. People whose home situations didn't support focus. Their struggles were real. But so was the productivity of people who finally had the environment they needed.

Now companies are demanding "return to office" for "collaboration" and "culture." They're not seeing the productivity gains. They're seeing empty desks and assuming that's the problem. For many of us, the empty desk was the solution.

What I Actually Do

Here's how I work after 45 years of figuring this out:

I communicate asynchronously. Email, tickets, documentation. Write once, read whenever. No one has to interrupt their focus to receive information from me.

I batch meetings. If I have to meet, I schedule them back-to-back on one day. The rest of the week is uninterrupted. One bad day is better than five fragmented days.

I say no. "Let's hop on a quick call" usually means "let me interrupt your focus for my convenience." Most of these can be emails. I treat my focus time as non-negotiable.

I work when others don't. Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Not because I'm a workaholic. Because that's when no one interrupts. Two hours at 6am is worth eight hours during "business hours."

I ship finished work. Instead of "let me show you what I'm thinking," I ship working code. Review the output, not the process. This respects everyone's time.

The Solo Stack: How I Code Alone Without Breaking Production

Working alone doesn't mean working recklessly. I don't trust myself. I trust my toolchain. Here's what replaces the human redundancy of pair programming:

The linter is my first reviewer. Strict ESLint, Clippy, or language-specific rules catch the obvious mistakes before I even run the code. No human needed to tell me I forgot a semicolon or used a deprecated API.

The test suite is my safety net. I aim for meaningful coverage on critical paths. Not 100% for vanity metrics—but enough that breaking changes fail loudly. Tests run on every save. If they pass, I have confidence. If they fail, I know immediately.

Git hooks prevent stupidity. Pre-commit hooks run linters and tests automatically. I literally cannot push broken code to main. The machine says no before I embarrass myself.

CI/CD is my QA team. Every push triggers a full build, test suite, and deployment preview. If something breaks in staging, I find out in minutes—not after a two-hour code review meeting.

Type systems catch what I miss. TypeScript, Rust's borrow checker, Go's compiler—these aren't bureaucracy. They're colleagues who never take lunch breaks and never miss obvious errors.

The point isn't that I'm smarter than a team. The point is that ruthless automation replaces human redundancy. I get the safety of multiple reviewers without the interruption cost. The machine watches my back so humans don't have to.

Solo Work Fit Assessment

Check which characteristics apply to you to see if solo work is your optimal mode:

Solo Work Fit Scorecard

"If you also work better alone, you're not broken. You're not antisocial. You're not a bad team player."