I find it hard to stay engaged doing this. I do get good results, but it's just hard to not get distracted when it's doing the work.

claude is so slow for interactive use like described, do people just run it in low effort mode or what?

I multi-task. While I’m waiting for Claude, I either check email or work with a different instance of Claude on a second problem

You can only check your email so many times, and you can only work on so many problems at once. You also generally have to be mindful of token consumption. I think it also leads to burnout to work on so much at once. I've been working this way for like a year.