There’s nothing that strikes fear more than those 3 words… "can you just"… To any normal person those words just mean, press the pause button… have a quick look at something then jump back on to what you were doing…
Does it mean that to me…? No… "can you just" means literally pouring a bucket of water on a bonfire…
"Can you just" means tearing down the locked in focus I’ve been applying to a task, establishing it on this new task… completing it and then fully re-establishing the focus back on the original one…
Is that a 2 minute task…? No… Is it a 10 minute task…? No… to be honest it’s probably about 30 minutes before I’m back to the same level of efficiency and focus…
That "can you just"... including the time to actually do the thing... has more than likely destroyed an hours worth of actual productivity… and what’s worse… the thing probably could have waited…
It takes a long time to dry out a bonfire after all…