What do you do if interruptions are hindering your programming productivity?

Identify events or patterns in the day that hinder your activity as a programmer and take active steps to not let it affect you. It is scientifically known that just the act of open emails distracts you and even overwhelms by claiming your attention. So you can set a specific time for reading and responding to your emails to be able to process them well. This also helps you manage your exposure to information and helps enhance your prioritization ability and decision making. Even the most intelligent of humans can take as much information load at a time, so we must balance it out and ensure it doesn't create distraction or fatigue to affect programming productivity.

If you see interruptions hindering your programming productivity, identify a time in the day when you can solely focus on your work and coding tasks, and do nothing else apart from that in that time. Also make sure that you devote time for team meetings, emails, team collaboration later. You must be able to balance your individual and team priorities and following a schedule will help you ensure that no task goes unnoticed or is compromised.

Creating a schedule for deep work is important. What is more important is then establishing boundaries and communicating that schedule to others on your team and in your company. Work with your boss to help make sure that your schedule isn't going to conflict with important duties and get buy-in for your deep work. One way to help get buy-in is to have something to show for it from time to time. If others see you have deep work time and that it is yielding awesome results, they are going to support it and even may establish "focus days" at the company... which is a real win for you and the company!

I've found it's really important to set up email filters and regularly adjust them as necessary. If your inbox is under constant attack from notifications and updates, these need to be categorized and put away for viewing at other times leaving only the most important items to be read. Not doing so can leave you feeling like you always need to be on the lookout for that important email buried in the haystack and distract you from what really needs to be done.

The Pomodoro Technique is helpful for managing time and creating a space for focused work sessions of 25 minutes, after which you take a 5 minute break. This helps you enhance concentration, break down a seemingly difficult task into manageable parts and take necessary breaks in between to come back afresh.

Setting boundaries is one of the key factors that improved my projects. As you move up in the engineering hierarchy, you're going to be brought into more decision making discussions. These are a major drain on productivity if you're still actively coding. It's important to carve out time to focus on your priorities. Set blocks of time on your work calendar well in advance (at the start of a sprint, for example), seeing aside Do Not Disturbed time and communicate with all stakeholders in your day-to-day that this time is to be uninterrupted.

Setting boundaries to manage interruptions can be done at the team level via the 'interruption shield': a single member of the engineering team is tasked to answer support requests and random questions from members of other teams. This frees the rest of the team to work free of interruptions. The interruption shield is a rotating role similar to on-call when responding to production incidents. Reference: Time Management for System Administrators, Chapter 1

I think most of us know what is hindering our programming time. I think many just don't do anything about it or think it is not a problem. My recommendation is that you give yourself some deep work time and remove all distractions (put that phone away and stay away from social media) and you will quickly see how much can be done in such a short period of time.