Programmer Interrupted
At my last company us developers complained that we were getting interrupted too much, so the boss asked us to keep a list of interruptions. By lunch on the first day we all had 3+ pages, so he believed us and we implemented the following:<p>Each week, one pair of programmers would be designated the "consulting developers", and a big sign would be put above their desk. They were the <i>only</i> developers that could be interrupted for the week, allowing the rest of us to get a lot of work done. If the consulting developers needed to ask something of other developers, we tried to save it up for lunch, as we mostly all ate together anyway.<p>This made an enormous difference to our productivity, which everyone in the company took notice of when the number of "development days" we got done each week increased dramatically.<p>At the start we thought of "sacrifice one for the good of all" and we didn't look forward to our turn. As time went on it actually turned out differently. We usually enjoyed the "consulting" time as it meant a break from the routine of working on endless tickets, and it also kept us in touch with what the rest of the company was doing with regards to deploys, environments, configs, etc. etc.<p>AFAIK they still do it today