This is a great way to explain it. My wife used to suggest that I work on a side project of mine when I had a few free minutes here or there. I had a hard time explaining why it wasn't really worth the effort unless I could work on it for at least an hour. She trusts me on that, even if I didn't do a great job explaining why, but it seems like this explanation would make the reasons easier to convey.
I've quit a job once because of that. The company wanted to have an in-house developer, but failed at understanding what it involves and providing an appropriate environment.
One-half of the office was open plan with people talking on the phone all day, the other was a room full of editors talking to each other every 5 minutes. When I explained I needed a quiet place to work, they either thought I was not a "team-player", or that I was cheating on them to surf Facebook all day. It's really hard to explain when the company's core is not software development.
They also wanted me to develop new features, but no one had 30 min to set aside to talk and gather requisites. Worst job I've had.
Nowadays I work from my home office. Not only I'm more productive, I've cut a 3 hours/day commute. Best career decision I've made.
It drives me crazy when people say "just wear headphones". Would you take the SAT while wearing headphones? Because there are plenty of programming problems that are as hard as anything on the SAT.
(I know I read that analogy somewhere, probably on HN.)
Wow I started to read this, then started thinking oh just another "leave me alone while I program" post from 5 years ago.
After reading the comments here I went back and read the complete post. Glad I did. That was a great way to describe how interruptions kill the processes.
