Well you won't have IM or email open while pairing :) you'll be focured on the conversation you're having with your pair. They're not watching you you're collaborating

As someone who pair programmed 8 hours a day for 10+ years, it’s important to note that there is an ebb and flow. Sometimes we were collaborating fully. Sometimes one of us got up to make coffee and looked at Instagram on their phone for 20 minutes while the other tried to get tests to pass. Then we reunited and caught each other up. It’s easy to dwell on the intense part of pairing, but it’s just as important to purposefully acknowledge your humanity and expect to take real actual breaks and go sit in a comfy chair and zone out for a short while or go to a doctor appointment or chat up another person at the water cooler for a bit.

8 hours a day pairing means that pairing is the default, but it’s not the only thing that ever happens.

also: 8 hours/day pairing meant 16 hours/day not working at all in my case. Really really really not working. Not checking Slack. Not trying out some crazy idea. Not working at all.

you are not being interrupted. your partner is thinking with you and is paying close attention to what you are doing. they will know you well enough to not interrupt you while you are focusing on something specific. they will wait for the right moment to speak up if they have something to add, and even then they will not change the focus to some other part of the task if they know that this would disrupt you.

this takes time to learn of course. and individuals handle this differently. i to can't handle interruptions, but when i am focusing a piece of code, and my partner telling me or asking me something about that same piece of code, then for me that's not an interruption. interruptions are notifications and being asked to change the focus on something different. that should not happen when pair programming.

another aspect not mentioned yet, when there is an actual interruption from the outside, one of the people in the pair can handle that interruption, while the other continues to focus. the interrupted one can then jump back in much faster than you would if you were interrupted while alone.

But that's the entire point. Pair programming isn't for producing more working code in this session faster. It's that it empirically is the fastest way to erase knowledge gaps because the two of you are working on a shared artifact.

That’s the ideal, but if you have the person at the keyboard doing too much of the planning then it’s really easy for the other person to just check out mentally.

the other person is a typist that thinks through the ideas they hear and critiques them while they are typing.