These days my work is split between developing new software, keeping various systems and databases humming along and helping out anyone on our team on a wide variety of issues. My time is almost always in demand by someone and occasionally I get so many requests for help that days or even weeks go by before I can make effective progress on my own development projects.

When this starts to happen what I do is start making my own private scrumm burndown chart at the beginning and end of each day by adding a few rows to a spreadsheet with the estimated hours remaining on each of my development tasks along with a note on how I actually spent my day. I then review this with my boss and ask him whether or not he thinks I've been prioritizing properly and leave it up to him to adjust everyone's expectations (which is usually easy because I make sure to keep good records and structure our communications).

But while I'm fortunate to be working in a good team, there's no denying the psychic toll of constant task switching is disruptive. Unfortunately I know of no easy solution other than to spend the time to re-focus. Sometimes it can take a whole day of just re-reading code, making notes and fiddling around writing and rewriting little things before I can get back into a solid productive development flow.