(1) I definitely experience "flow state" (c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) for explanation). It is, unfortunately, random and unpredictable as to when it occurs and what conditions trigger it.
Sometimes, it comes first thing in the morning as my feet are hitting the floor, I'm razor-focused on the task I want to accomplish right away and I sit at my desk and productivity pours out of me. Sometimes, it happens mid-day - often two or three hours after waking up. Unfortunately, sometimes it happens just as I'm getting ready for bed - I lie down, my head hits the pillow, then I feel it come on - and, most times, I'll grumble as I get back out of bed and sit back down at my keyboard.
The one thing that's for sure is that my biorhythmic lows are 2-4 PM, and if I'm staying up all night long, from 4-6 AM. During those hours, I actually struggle to just stay awake, let alone be productive. I keep thinking about experimenting with dividing my 8-10 hours of sleep into two chunks per day: one from 1-5 PM and the other from 2-6 AM.
(2) I generally have self-established predefined hours every workday: 8 AM to 10 PM. However, I'm 80% telecommute, and the 20% that I commute is generally flexible within reasonable boundaries - e.g., I'm not penalized for not arriving by a pre-set time, nor do I punch the clock and leave at a pre-set time.
I have never had a job where I had pre-set hours, so I honestly can't say how I would actually feel about it. Perhaps that says a lot about how I would feel about it, actually. Strongly enough that in 15+ years of continuous employment, I've never once held a job that required it, and have no intentions of in the future.
(3) Evidence-based scheduling enables you to estimate a certain level of "planned interruption." This is the "overhead" of collaboration and communication. I don't think this is what you're asking about, though.
Truly unplanned interruptions - i.e., emergencies - are interesting. Given proper engineering discipline, these should be so rare that to drop everything and respond to them with full attention is infrequent enough that I don't worry about their impact.
In the case of responding to an emergency, I prefer people to remain as calm as possible, remember to maintain a professional behavior, and to stay focused on the positive desired outcomes. I have no trouble asking, or telling, people who cannot do these things to GET THE FUCK OUT of the situation room in an emergency, because to manage around them just makes things more risky. There is plenty of time for cluelessness, rage and blamethrowing AFTER the emergency is resolved. Those things are not acceptable to me during an emergency, nor should they be.
(4) I am first a pure hacker (doing for the sake of doing regardless of perceived boundaries) as well as very business-focused (if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one around to sell it, it's worthless).
Personally, I liken Meyers-Briggs to horoscopes: write something generalized enough and it'll apply to 90% of the population. However, I DO find codified descriptions of archetypical personalities useful as a form of communicative shorthand. To that end, I most closely resemble a mixture of INTJ and ENTP.
(5) I am constantly using forms of text-based store-and-forward (email, IM, IRC, SMS, etc.) communication. It is currently the highest concurrency form of communication we have available, and therefore is the most efficient for me. I actively avoid audio/video communication as it's single-threaded and therefore highly disruptive, as well as very low-throughput in terms of information exchange.
Regarding answering and asking questions, I'd like to clarify the question by rephrasing it: do I more frequently initiate communication by asking others questions, or do others more frequently initiate communication with me by asking me questions?
To that question, I'll answer that others definitely initiate communication more with me than I do with others. To summarize it simply: I suspect many people treat me like their personal Google (search).
When I answer, I'll sometimes answer with a question that hopefully enables the asker to produce the answer themselves, or better align their thinking so that the answer will make sense, or lead them to learn what they need to learn in order to understand the answer or deduce the answer themselves.
(6) I feel I am more productive when collaborating with people, but not necessarily working geographically adjacent to them.
Unless the work task is solely to communicate with someone else in real-time, making real-time interruptive communication so frictionless through geographic adjacency results in it occurring too frequently, which interferes with getting the actual task at hand done.
Sure, I'll be the first to say that working elbow to elbow with collaborators is fun - and don't get me wrong, fun is a critical component of work - there is a time and a place for it - happy hour after work, or weekend get-togethers, etc. But, time spent in single-threaded real-time communication is time spent not completing work, so it should be kept to the minimum and no more or less.
(1) I definitely experience "flow state" (c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) for explanation). It is, unfortunately, random and unpredictable as to when it occurs and what conditions trigger it.
Sometimes, it comes first thing in the morning as my feet are hitting the floor, I'm razor-focused on the task I want to accomplish right away and I sit at my desk and productivity pours out of me. Sometimes, it happens mid-day - often two or three hours after waking up. Unfortunately, sometimes it happens just as I'm getting ready for bed - I lie down, my head hits the pillow, then I feel it come on - and, most times, I'll grumble as I get back out of bed and sit back down at my keyboard.
The one thing that's for sure is that my biorhythmic lows are 2-4 PM, and if I'm staying up all night long, from 4-6 AM. During those hours, I actually struggle to just stay awake, let alone be productive. I keep thinking about experimenting with dividing my 8-10 hours of sleep into two chunks per day: one from 1-5 PM and the other from 2-6 AM.
(2) I generally have self-established predefined hours every workday: 8 AM to 10 PM. However, I'm 80% telecommute, and the 20% that I commute is generally flexible within reasonable boundaries - e.g., I'm not penalized for not arriving by a pre-set time, nor do I punch the clock and leave at a pre-set time.
I have never had a job where I had pre-set hours, so I honestly can't say how I would actually feel about it. Perhaps that says a lot about how I would feel about it, actually. Strongly enough that in 15+ years of continuous employment, I've never once held a job that required it, and have no intentions of in the future.
(3) Evidence-based scheduling enables you to estimate a certain level of "planned interruption." This is the "overhead" of collaboration and communication. I don't think this is what you're asking about, though.
Truly unplanned interruptions - i.e., emergencies - are interesting. Given proper engineering discipline, these should be so rare that to drop everything and respond to them with full attention is infrequent enough that I don't worry about their impact.
In the case of responding to an emergency, I prefer people to remain as calm as possible, remember to maintain a professional behavior, and to stay focused on the positive desired outcomes. I have no trouble asking, or telling, people who cannot do these things to GET THE FUCK OUT of the situation room in an emergency, because to manage around them just makes things more risky. There is plenty of time for cluelessness, rage and blamethrowing AFTER the emergency is resolved. Those things are not acceptable to me during an emergency, nor should they be.
(4) I am first a pure hacker (doing for the sake of doing regardless of perceived boundaries) as well as very business-focused (if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one around to sell it, it's worthless).
Personally, I liken Meyers-Briggs to horoscopes: write something generalized enough and it'll apply to 90% of the population. However, I DO find codified descriptions of archetypical personalities useful as a form of communicative shorthand. To that end, I most closely resemble a mixture of INTJ and ENTP.
(5) I am constantly using forms of text-based store-and-forward (email, IM, IRC, SMS, etc.) communication. It is currently the highest concurrency form of communication we have available, and therefore is the most efficient for me. I actively avoid audio/video communication as it's single-threaded and therefore highly disruptive, as well as very low-throughput in terms of information exchange.
Regarding answering and asking questions, I'd like to clarify the question by rephrasing it: do I more frequently initiate communication by asking others questions, or do others more frequently initiate communication with me by asking me questions?
To that question, I'll answer that others definitely initiate communication more with me than I do with others. To summarize it simply: I suspect many people treat me like their personal Google (search).
When I answer, I'll sometimes answer with a question that hopefully enables the asker to produce the answer themselves, or better align their thinking so that the answer will make sense, or lead them to learn what they need to learn in order to understand the answer or deduce the answer themselves.
(6) I feel I am more productive when collaborating with people, but not necessarily working geographically adjacent to them.
Unless the work task is solely to communicate with someone else in real-time, making real-time interruptive communication so frictionless through geographic adjacency results in it occurring too frequently, which interferes with getting the actual task at hand done.
Sure, I'll be the first to say that working elbow to elbow with collaborators is fun - and don't get me wrong, fun is a critical component of work - there is a time and a place for it - happy hour after work, or weekend get-togethers, etc. But, time spent in single-threaded real-time communication is time spent not completing work, so it should be kept to the minimum and no more or less.