How To Handle Interruptions

Your productivity and ultimately success is determined on your ability to focus continuously on the things you need to do. Now, the most negatively impactful thing that can happen at work or when you're working on projects is interruptions. And especially so in this time where a lot of people have moved the office to their home. Start your week. Great. Start your week with a coach. I'm your host, certified high performance coach Sean Butner. And we're going to talk about something that'll help you advance in your life this week. So let's go. On average, it takes 23 minutes for people to get back on track after being interrupted, according to a study done by University of California, Irvine. If you do creative work and you're introverted, it could be double that because you spend as much time trying to get into the right energy after an interruption. And that's not part of the study that, that energy part, but it's from my experience as an introvert, you know, in career as a software engineer. I've had this happen to me tons of times earlier on when I was a more junior software engineer and you know, I'd have a big project to complete, but I'd have walk ups, critical maintenance calls, spontaneous meetings, friends showing up. And it was frustrating because it would feel like just when I was about, you know, got my head straight, was in a good calm spot to be creative, that it would be interrupted and I, you know, the rug would be pulled off from underneath me and I'd be working on something else. And so I felt frustrated. I felt like I never really controlled my time and I was always responding to other people's poorly planned emergencies or faux emergencies. And at the end of the day I would have to do extra work to get caught up on my project work. I'd just be completely exhausted and then you just rinse and repeat. So it was a miserable experience and it was really unsustainable. I realized that I would probably go absolutely bonkers crazy if I didn't change something. So something needed to change. And what was that? That something was me. I realize that, you know, there's always a high demand for your attention, whether that's people at work, social media, the new you name it. There are tons of things trying to get your attention and at the same time, you know, you needed to really be a weapon when it came time to focus. And what does that mean? You really needed to crush it. You really needed to be effective and productive when you got things done. So I started doing things like switching where I would do my Work, right? I wouldn't do it at my desk. I would go to a conference room, I would go to a coffee shop and for one hour just zone in and do the code, right? I'd have conversations with my boss when I did get interrupted, that, hey, I can help with this or these types of things, but then this project's going to be late, so what should I focus on, right? And you know, what that helped me do is like, okay, yes, we really need to focus this. Or he could then advocate be like, well, send him to me and I'll tell them no while you get this done for them, right? And so I had that support to then sit down for an hour and do the works that I needed to do. So have you ever been in an environment where there's interruptions that happen to you all the time? You know, does that seem unnecessarily stressful or that it's because other people really weren't managing their projects or stuff properly? You know, did people tell you it was your time management skills that needed to improve, when in reality is probably your communication skills? So if that's you, then here are five ideas to help you really thrive when you're in that environment for interruptions, whether that's at home because of the pandemic or when you're back in the office. So the first thing I think is really important to consider is, you know, what's your environment and what are your environmental signals? And what do I mean by that? Number one, it's like I said from my story, when I would go to like a coffee shop or conference room and step away from my desk, it was a signal that I wasn't available, right? I set a meeting for lunch or set a meeting to go to the coffee shop and just spend one hour focused. And I wouldn't look at emails. I wouldn't, you know, that was all I was focused on. People could check my calendar and just see that was blocked off for working on stuff. And during that time I could really advance the projects and project work that I needed to do so that, you know, usually if I had a couple of those blocks in, made some really good progress, I had more. It felt like I had more bandwidth to handle all the extra stuff that would just show up during the day. And it really changed my stress levels, it changed my satisfaction with my work, and it really helped me then, you know, get noticed and promoted eventually with enough time to focus. So changing your environment in that way of just switching where you're doing the work, if that's possible, possible for you. It's super, super important. I also, if you have like an open work plan or where people, you don't have a door that you can close, sometimes having like noise canceling headphones just as a signal of like I'm focused in can really, really help, you know, having a schedule posted on like I am not talking to you during these times or anyone you know, Please respect that, right? So that there's environmental cues like a schedule or headphones that can help cue people in that, hey, I can't be interrupted right now. And so what is that for you? What can you signal or what can you structure? Could you set up or where could you go to work in order to set up that boundary to access? Right. That leads me to my second point. Right? So you can change your environment and the cues that you have in your environment or you could follow what I like to call the hierarchy of community communication. Right? And there's basically three different categories. All communication comes in, it's asynchronous, right? Meaning that you don't have to respond in real time. So like this video is asynchronous. I'm communicating to you, you are thinking about it. Maybe you're yelling at the screen, maybe you're throwing stuff at me, I don't know. But it's a one way communication. You could choose to respond in a comment and I recommend that you do. If you have any questions or comments, I'd love to hear from you, but it's, you know, I say something and then when you're ready to respond, you send me an email, post a comment in the comment section. Right? So that's asynchronous. And so in a work context, I consider this instant messaging, text messaging and emails. Right? So, and I say this is like not very urgent and not super complex. So it's really good for when you have to set a time for a meeting. Hey, when can we do lunch? When can we get this big meeting with all these people together? Handle that in email. It doesn't require your immediate attention. Right. Step up from that. When you have something that is really context heavy, where there might be nuance or things that aren't super clear, you might have to talk things out. That's when you do a phone call, conference call or video call, right? So you get that real time feedback of like, hey, I'm explaining this feature. You see someone like scratching their hat and you're like, hey, what don't you understand about that? And so usually the indicator for this is if you've had an email go back and forth on the same topic, more than two emails, you should probably turn it into a more richer form of communication. So you go into that synchronous communication, but not in person, right. For things that are really urgent, extremely urgent, like the world's about to end if you don't solve this, or things that are highly complex, having that synchronous conversation in person, which is the third kind of category, is super important. So you get to draw stuff on the whiteboard, on pieces of paper. You get to instantly communicate. Hey, like, you need the database team to do this. Like, okay, we got this now we're uploading the code, we're pushing the code out to production software engineer stuff. But, you know, you have like different groups, different stakeholders that need to respond really quickly or in time, super helpful. And so that's when you do the FaceTime, you know, whiteboard type thing, or you have like a big brainstorm and you're trying to facilitate everyone's participation in a brainstorm or discussion. Right? Because then you can pick up on social cues and be like, hey, that person is here, hasn't said anything. We should make sure that we at least give them the microphone a little bit to get their thoughts right. Super important in those types of things. So, you know, the biggest part about the hierarchy of communication is identifying that, like, how urgent is it, how complex is it, what modality do I need to use? And then communicating that continually to the people you work with. Where, like, for me, I only check email three times a day, in the morning, after lunch, and then usually at the end of the day if I have to, like, hey, saw this, I'm gonna get to it tomorrow. Right? So communicating that to the people you work with is super important. So they know how to get your attention for the right context. Right? Like, if you're working from home and you know, you have kids that are working with you, you're like, you don't interrupt, interrupt dad. Unless the house is on fire, somebody is injured or eminently going to be injured or whatever criteria you have, not because you need a snack and you can go get a snack out of the cupboard yourself type thing. Right? Well, hope that makes sense. But yeah. So communicating that hierarchy of what's an example of something important or something that's urgent or not, and just having that conversation with the people you interact with can be super, super helpful and get you to that one hour of focus time. Right. The third idea to think about is communicating impacts Right. So going back to my story about earlier on as a junior engineer, software engineer, you know, usually like it started out where I was super eager and didn't really feel confident like speaking up to people. And so I'd have a project or a set of projects I was working on that was always fun. And then inevitably someone's like, hey, trying to get someone hold of someone on your team because this is broken and we need it fixed right now. This is such an urgent thing. And like what's the urgent thing? It's like this button is green instead of blue and we really need to change it. It's like, okay, that's not an emergency in this particular case. But okay, let's take care. It should be a quick thing, we'll just take care of it. Enough of going along with that without letting your project manager know, without letting other folks know really can impact your productivity. Right? So like communicating impacts is just saying, okay, hey, you want this button change from, you know, blue to yellow or whatever the color is, let's go talk to my manager and because I can either do this and fix this very important issue for you, or I can implement this feature that you asked for two weeks ago that you're still waiting on, like, what is. What you. What do you want me to do? And inevitably they'll say, hey, you should do both. Like, but if we have to focus on one, which, which is the most important here? And that's the key question, like, what's most important here? And that's what you're trying to answer with everyone around you, right? And so by communicating that impact to your manager or project manager or the other people you're working with, like, hey, we can focus on this, but we're giving up this. You're facilitating buy in to what you should focus on. You're also enlisting support so the people around you to be like, hey, like, don't bug that person. They have stuff they need to do. We'll work it and fold it into what we got to do and we'll rank it and prioritize it. So super important to communicate the impacts to your work to the people that are impacted by it. Okay? Fourth thing to think about is ultimately the first three points are trying to help you create a block of time that you can defend to the death. Okay. In high performance, we call it block time. So it's a 50 minute focus period where all you're working on is that one thing and you take a 10 minute bio break, stretch, break, kind of get your Energy back up so you can get after it and you live or die by your block time. And I've seen it time and time again with clients. I've seen it time and time again in my own productivity, in my business when I worked in as a corporate technologist, I guess a software engineer, it really can change everything, right? Because number one, when you get that whole hour of block time you are locked in. And as I said, I'm introverted. So if I get interrupted, it takes me a little bit to kind of deal with the frustration and stress of that and then another 20 minutes to then like, where was I? Okay, this is where everything is before you get into like the good, juicy, creative, productive part of, you know, being focused on a task. So yeah, you have to set those locks, you have to defend them to the death. When it comes to, you know, changing your environment or when you're going to check communications or communicating impacts, this is something you should communicate to like, hey, you know boss, I am from 10 to 11 every day I'm going to be away from my desk just working on project X or and at like from 2 to 3 in the afternoon. Those are the two hours that are dedicated to project time. You know, do more if you can, but ideally you're doing everything in block time but sometimes in a very high paced and high pressure environment it's not possible. But as many blocks you can do like, here's my schedule, here's when I'll be answering things, here's how you can reach me if you really, really, really need me to work on something. Then you have that conversation of like, hey, I can do this but we're giving up time and resources on that. It can really just change the game. So that's the first three points of change your environment hierarchy of communication, communicate. Your impacts are helping you create that block of super productive focus time. And the fifth thing to think about is to, you know, is the request or is the interruption something you can delegate or say no to? And one of the things again in my tech career that was really powerful was learning how to say no and learning how to say no in a way that didn't ruffle feathers and how to say no in a way that protected your time. Right. I think for most people the default should be like no. I don't know the impact of what you're asking and you know, it's going to take some time to figure out how to get it on the schedule. It's best to be, you know, support ticket, a feature request Some type of work management process that you probably have unique to your situation. It's so powerful because once people realize they can't go to you, every time they have a problem, you'll notice something really interesting and that's. It either will get solved on its own or they'll fuck. They'll figure it out, right? If you're not the like, okay, I have a problem, I need to go talk to Sean. And you go talk to Sean and Sean helps you. Or you're like, oh, I got a problem. I should Google it. I should. Let me think, like, what would I need to try before I go got help? You know, a lot of times, at least in my experience, attack things aren't so critical that they need to be solved right then and there or they need your help. Right. You know, I had a guy I worked with that just loved running meetings. And so anytime needed to make a decision, he would gather as many people he could to get in a room and hash it out. Even if you weren't working on the projects or knew anything about it, it was really, really super, super annoying, you know. So saying no to those meetings was a big free up of time, of space, of frustration and stress in my career. And I offer that to you guys for your consideration. So I know that these strategies can help you protect and create those times of focus. We can really just go out there and crush it. And I know sometimes it can be a little scary, especially if you're early in your career of speaking up and saying like, hey, like, I need this or I need to protect this time, or, you know, let's just have the discussion of do I do this or do I do that? Because I only have so much capacity and something is going to be more important than the other, right? It's not that you can only do one thing. It's like, what's the most important thing here again, is to think. And if you can stick with it, you can implement these strategies. You'll see a change in your productivity, you'll be noticed as a weapon at getting things done, and you'll reduce your stress levels along the way. So that said, guys, if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below or send me an email if you got this on the newsletter. I'd love to to hear from you. Go out there, live with more joy, more personal growth, and more impact in your communities. This is Sean Butner signing off. Take care, Sam.