Work Interruptions — The killers of Productivity and how to handle office interrupts effectively

Workplace Interruptions

“Don’t interrupt me while I’m interrupting.” — Winston Churchill.

What are workplace and office interrupts?

We all know how it goes on your normal workday.

You come to work pumped up with an organized schedule for your day and slowly as the hours go by — nothing gets done.

You complete your day with your priorities not advancing, frustrated and angry, and with a bucket full of tasks for the night and the day after.

That’s exactly how my day used to look. And it got all the wind out of my sails…

How to stop interruptions at work? What are work interrupts and are they a must?

When something is causing you to lose focus on what you are doing it’s a distraction.

And interrupt is a form of distraction — but it also deliberately takes your attention from the task you are working on.

So the target is to work differently with interrupts to the point in which they — at worst — become short distractions.

Yes — I do understand that interruptions are a daily routine — especially in the office/Hi-tech industry — but there is a better way to handle them.

But the first thing you need to come to terms with — they will not go away whatever you do!

And quite honestly — sometimes they are needed to get the job done.

When you are onboarding a new teammate and he/she needs guidance on how to proceed or when you are working on a time-sensitive task and need quick responses to get the job done — Interrupts are critical.

And just like a PC CPU — some interrupts need to be handled right away to get things moving (like a WiFi packet that needs to be handled for the voice call to continue smoothly) and some can wait a while for a better time as they are not so urgent (like most of the tasks that your applications are doing in the background).

Don’t hate the interrupter — Hate the interrupt

An important point to keep in mind is that the interrupter is not perceiving this the same way you do — for them, it is the most urgent or important thing: you must answer their question now because they have nothing else to do, or you must read this important news message on a new baby penguin that was born…

Embrace Interrupts — They will happen regardless, so don’t let them kill your day or your motivation.

Fearing distractions fosters resentment against the ones doing the distracting. Recognize that you will be distracted sometimes and accept those distractions as opportunities to improve.

If you need some “pick me up method” Use the “Interrupt squares” technique

What is the technique — before each one-hour work session draw 4 small boxes, just enough to mark a “V” in them.

every time an interrupt happens — mark a V in one.

with an average of one every 15 minutes — you can expect usually 4 in a working session.

This will not block interrupts but only make you feel more in control — Sounds easy, right? An expected distraction has no power over your day. You still have control.

Valid and In-Valid Interrupts — Which ones impact productivity?

Valid interrupts are the ones that are time-critical to benefit you also (even if it means to keep good relations with someone else so that when you will require their help they will give you the same priority).

In-Valid are the ones that are not time-critical to either of the parties and can wait — but they need to be postponed in a “Nice Way” to not impact your relationship or in a smarter way to be done in the appropriate time.

There are various types of interrupts, some of them will surprise you:

• E-mail notifications
• Messages and various Chat apps notifications
• Social media feeds and notifications
• Phone calls
• App notifications and Daily news site alerts
• Coworkers stopping by (or your family members if you are working from home)
• Managers (interrupting your work asking for status reports or to change your priorities).

What do office interruptions cause? — and a few “fun” facts to take into account on workplace interruptions.

When you are concentrated on something and your mental energy is focused on the important task at hand — the frequent interrupts do not only have a severe impact on your output, they also cause a great impact on your mental energy to continue the task, your motivation and more importantly your work satisfaction and stress levels.

A few “fun” facts:

• People spend an average of 11 minutes on a task before they’re interrupted (UC Irvine study).
• Every interrupt causes your brain to keep some part of the focus and attention on the interrupted task — depending on the type and length (see below on “Attention Residue”).
• It takes on average 15 minutes to get back to the point they were at before a distraction in terms of focus and productivity (University of California).
• Even after a 2.8-second interruption, subjects in a study doubled their error rates (Journal of Experimental Psychology).
• And their error rates tripled after a 4.5-second distraction.
• Workers who are frequently interrupted reported 9% higher exhaustion rates (International Journal of Stress Management).
• Almost as high as the 12 percent increase in exhaustion due to work overload.
• Workers who are frequently interrupted report high-stress levels — regardless of work capacity.
• People self-interrupt almost as often as being interrupted by external sources.

STOP Blaming technology! It can be Productive and Efficient

Technology has brought us many new tools and applications to get distracted by — but the way that you manage and use them is entirely up to you.

If you let them interrupt you — they will!

If you use them correctly, as we will soon see — they can save you massive amounts of time and improve your productivity — and even help you fight technology with technology,

And if you don’t believe me — wait until you get that “Ding!” when a chat message comes in “Microsoft Teams” or WhatsApp — It saved you a phone call that would take more than the seconds it will take you to read and reply — but how much time did you hold off until you opened the message and read it or worse, what did you stop doing to do that …..

The Manager View — How you can impact office and workplace productivity

If you are a manager — your job is to minimize interruptions

Why is that? — You are responsible for the productivity of your people. And interruptions are the biggest obstacle to productivity.

It impacts your people’s output, their stress level, exhaustion, and satisfaction at work.

Since these are your main goals — target the biggest problem — and allocate time to handle this by setting rules and processes to reduce the impact.

Start by behaving responsibly with other people’s time and do not interrupt.

Be available but self-aware

If you’re a manager, an important part of your job is to be available to people, to handle urgent issues, and to coach your team members.

If the conversation takes more than 5 minutes — try to schedule a meeting to handle it later.

And if you’re perceiving these tasks as interruptions, you may have to rethink your priorities. That could involve delegating other tasks so that you can spend more time catching up with your team.

Best techniques and tips for handling work Interruptions better

Tools to increase Productivity and Succeed

To battle interrupts better you need to have an arsenal of tools that together will form a system in which you won’t need too much self-discipline to handle interruptions and will minimize the inner struggle.

Use visual cues

• Headphones — especially the ones which you also use for meeting audio/video calls — are great to let people know that you are not available. And you can use them also for music (classical or white noise) when you are not on a call and need to concentrate. So if someone approaches you when you are with your headphones on — they think that you are on a call and do not get offended that you gave them a sign that you will get back to them. Get some from Amazon — just make it — Over the ear headphones.
• “Do not Disturb” mode with whichever tool you use with your team — Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google chat, etc. when you are working on something and need to minimize the interrupts — The other side interrupting, is not offended since they see you are not available.
• A Sign or a “Traffic Light” — Agree with your team on a common sign to use during interruption-free hours and hold each other accountable for respecting that time. I use in my desk at the office and at home, a small traffic light — when it’s Red people know that I am not available and delay coming to me. You can look in the Tools section for more suggestions or get a recommended stop light from Amazon.

Interrupt log

I know, it sounds weird, why would you waste time on recording these interrupts ??

Let’s make a deal — keep it for a week. At the end of that week sit for 30 min and analyze what happened. I got some real “Light Bulb ON” moments when I did that, I changed some processes and workflows with my team and reduce a lot of interrupts because of it.

Also — according to the log and analyzing valid interrupts and how long they took — I blocked “fireman time” for handling those burning interrupts in my schedule that needed attention but were not part of the schedule until then.

You can either use an online tool or a basic notepad from Amazon.

Time-boxing your day

In a different post, I discussed why you should use your calendar and not a TODO list (Here)

I can’t stress it enough — everything that you are planning to do that day should have a time box in your calendar for it — if it’s not in the calendar, it doesn’t happen.

Use the “fireman block” from above to handle all the interrupts that came in, in an aggregated more efficient way.

During that time box you only take care of what is on the time box and put off every interrupt that is coming in — just remember to leave windows between your time boxes to handle the incoming interrupts and the routine interrupt (like emails).

Focus time

When there is a specific task that needs your concentration, have a tool in your arsenal called — “focus time” during this time block in your day — you completely disconnect…

and you can share it with your team member so that they will have a better understanding — during this period the team member will not take phone calls, review emails and will not be accessible for meetings or discussions — even go to another location where no one will interrupt you outside of your office, like a meeting room or a quiet garden.

This will give you some much-needed uninterrupted time to complete your tasks.

This should be handled with care — as we talked before, Interrupts are sometimes needed and are part of our world — don’t disconnect too many times or for a too long duration.

Pomodoro Technique

An excellent tool as part of the time boxes or the focus time is to use the Pomodoro technique — as shown in this previous Article.

Pause and Approve

Another alarming fact is that 73 percent of interruptions typically are handled right away without any priority consideration.

Once you’ve been interrupted, PAUSE — Do you really need to go and do that now or can it wait for later?

Try asking the interrupter — “Hey, I am a little busy right now, can I get back to you in X hours/days and we can handle that ?”

This first gives the interrupter a message of “I got that you need something” and second, by giving a time duration the other person feels that he can relax and this will be addressed.

Batching Tasks

Instead of handling every interrupts right away, postpone the tasks those interrupt involve to a closed amount of time and do them all at the same time instead of switching back and forth from your tasks to the interrupt tasks (The same way that a CPU delays some interrupts to better optimize the performance and power utilization — those which are not really time critical gets delayed and batched together).

Set Routine Meetings

One thing that kind of shocked me when I examined my Interrupt Log was that I had many interruptions from certain people, things were not urgent but they wanted to update me on things. By setting routine meetings with them a couple of times a week — they held off all the interrupts and aggregated them to that meeting — this has preempted many interrupts.

Focus on one task at a time

A research study from 2009 showed that the average human brain is not wired to switch attention between tasks. We are not designed for Multitasking!

Same as a CPU — it is not really multitasking, it’s quickly switching between tasks according to their priority and interrupts — and uses its memory to restore itself to the state it was before — and that takes time and energy …

Humans have an additional problem — When we do that task switching, part of our attention stays with the task that we had to switch from since it got interrupted, so we can’t stay focused on the current one 100%.

This is a phenomenon called “Attention Residue”.

We need to complete the tasks that we started, so we feel “guilty” about leaving it.

Have a “ready to resume” Plan

If you are working on Task A and got interrupted with task B — do not move directly to task B — take a minute to write down where you stopped in task A, what was the next step, and focus area (Same as the CPU does from the previous example).

People who do that experience much less attention residue on A, handle task B better and get back to full productivity on task A much quicker. So in case you get interrupted — tell the interrupter (even if it’s your Boss) “give me a sec to write down what I was in the middle of and I will be fully focused with you afterward” — they will appreciate it much more.

There is also another way to go by this and you can pick which better works for you — Leave things half done, for instance, leave a sentence in the middle — so when you come back you can clearly see what you are in the middle of.

Fight the urge to complete the line, or even harder, start a new line in case you just completed it. Do anything which will cause you to understand what you were in the middle of when you got interrupted.

Learn to say NO — politely.

And share it with your team — that this is a reasonable response but needs to be done right.

One of the key elements to stopping the interruption is to say “NO” to the interrupting person — but to not break the relationship you need to do it in a nice way that will not impact your future work together.

Check this post on how to say no at work without hurting someone.

So when you say no — keep these points:

• Try to really understand the priority and urgency of what they are asking.
• Clearly explain the justification of why you are saying “no” to that person — “not enough time”, “more urgent things to do” …
• Offer to direct to someone better suited for the task.
• Sometimes it is just a “NOT NOW” — so tell that person when you will be able to get to it at a more convenient time.

Work with the technology — Not against it!

One of the main distractors we have is our phone. and contrary to common belief — you don’t need to check it every few seconds.

Try doing this instead:

• TURN OFF ALL NOTIFICATIONS. Yes — that is what I meant, nothing is that urgent! Keep a few for phone calls incoming from key people (like your kids and wife) but all the rest can and will wait for a time that it is convenient for you to get back to them. Align with the people that might have something urgent to call if they need something really urgent — all the rest can wait! As I usually tell the team leads that I manage:

“We are making software, not life support machines — things can wait for an hour”.

• Have a watch nearby — either a wristwatch, a PC watch, or a wall clock. I saw that usually what happened to me is that I wanted to see the time, clicked the phone to look at the clock, and then saw the massive amounts of notifications and had to waste a few minutes handling them.
• In case you are still constantly checking your phone — think about keeping it in a different room or far away. Studies show that by adding that small step of an inconvenience it will make you reduce the times you got up to check it.
• Social Media — Use technology to protect you from technology. Install a site blocker so you can’t open news sites and social media when at work. Same for your Phone — block access to social media sites with an app.

Handling emails

Many of the emails we get are utter waste — a complete waste of time that we do not need to read or reply to.

Check this post on how to better handle emails.

And most importantly understand — emails are not a form of immediate communication system — you do not need to reply to that email as soon as it arrives — it can wait!

Calculate your planning buffers with interrupts

According to a posted research in the Organization Science If people are working on Task A and have time pressure on it, when they got interrupted and moved to task B — people did not process information carefully on task B, did not notice errors, and when asked to make a decision based on recalled information, they were less likely to identify the optimal solution. In contrast — when they had enough time to complete Task A and the deadline was far away — they did not experience any of these issues.

The “10 Minutes Rule” (Nir Eyal)

One of the best tricks I saw to handle internal interrupts is the one coined by Nir Eyal in his book “Indistractable”.

If you come to a point where you get the urge to stop the work that you are doing and move to something else, not in your priorities (phone message, a news feed, Facebook …) — tell yourself that it’s ok to do it, but in 10 minutes. After 10 minutes if you still feel the urge — go do it. In time, this will cause you to extend those 10 minutes more and more until you are able to postpone it in your break.

Take a Walk

When you feel too interrupted and need to get back to the original task you were working on — but lack the motivation and willpower to do it, take a 5-minute walk.

It will clear your head and help you get back to your desk feeling focused and ready to re-start your task.

How to handle interruptions when working from home?

In a nutshell, they are not so different from normal office interruptions.

Some things are easier and some are harder.

It’s easier to block emails, phone calls, notifications and get some appreciated quiet time to work and focus when you are working from home since there is no danger that some colleague will just pop up in your home office.

On the other hand, the other “people” that live with you might.

Besides finding a quiet place (no, the living room or the kitchen is not a quiet place ! — find yourself something you will be proud to call an office), use the same techniques above with the same visual queues — they work even better…

In Summary

Interrupts are a part of our life, they will happen — live with it.

But the tools above will help you live much better with them — and hopefully save you hours wasted on handling interrupts in a wrong way — as we all do today…

#Being Productive

I highly recommend that if you found the notes in this section interesting and relevant and you think that digging deeper in them will help you become more productive at work or when working from home, read this book:

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Now go get Productivated :-)

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