The Cost Of Interruptions: They Waste More Time Than You Think

I've got... 2000+ messages in my inbox right now, and get something like 100 or more per day.

A lot of these are automated alerts for systems I don't manage, and so get rule-filed into the trash.

The rest are meetings, status request updates, and other folderol that has nothing to do with me, often nothing to do with my department, and was a waste of time for someone to enter my name into the address field. Or a waste of time for me to be on a specific group mailing list.

rant mode on

Group distro lists need to go away because it's too easy and too thoughtless to email people who don't know or care about what it is the other person is mailing about. It encourages the "Well, I need to make sure $group knows about $thing, so I'll just use $group_distro_list" mindset, even though $group_distro_list has over 100 people on it and perhaps only 1-5 care about the content of the message.

Meetings. Roughly 90% of the meetings I get invited to don't concern me even tangentially. Of the remaining 10%, most of those could be handled over an email or IM. Email isn't used because, as mentioned before, it's a dumping ground for white noise. IM could be, and we're trying to get our PM's on board with that, but with with meeting subjects like: "You're on X Y and Z project, what is your status on this?" (repeated n times for n participants) - nothing that required disrupting the mental state of 10 or more people and bringing productivity to a halt for 2 or more hours.

People want communication, not noise. Irrelevant communication is noise.

Of course, then you need the whole team to be on board and diligent about task tracking, but that's a different ballgame.

Generally where email falls down is back and forth communication, but giving people a little time to think about something before a discussion can save a lot of time. The trick is to also have regular add hock meetings without interrupting people. An informal schedule might look like 1h post scrum is communication time; 12-4 is work time where leave people alone unless you have absolutely nothing else you can work on. And then 4-5 is a last chance to bother people before people start heading home.

PS: If you have a shared calendar it’s not a bad idea to block out ~12-4 so people look occupied on IM.

"Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."

I've seen a lot of arguments over the years about the pros and cons of open office spaces, and how generally greater awareness of what's happening and informal, ad-hoc contributions make the team as a whole more productive even if they aren't optimal for team members in isolation. Some of them do seem plausible.

However, I came to the conclusion that a lot of those arguments are unrealistic not long after first going freelance. I was then working at my own office, with my own equipment and software, on my own timescales, and with the ability to simply turn phones and e-mail off when I need to concentrate. It is amazing how much more productive that made me, compared to my previous job in an open plan office. I often do things in a day that I would have expected to take a week or more in the kind of high-distraction, open environments I worked in as an employee.

It's true that you need to communicate effectively if you have some separation, and that means making some changes if you're working remotely most of the time. It's also true that it's useful to get together face-to-face and catch up with colleagues from time to time, particularly if a project is moving rapidly. However, neither of those things requires full-time availability and being permanently subject to interruption. If get-together time is consolidated and planned in advance, I find it's still plenty fast and effective enough for probably 9 things out of 10 that aren't done on-line or with pre-planned calls anyway, and the other time someone just goes to where someone else is at shorter notice if it looks like it will be useful to be in the same place for a while.

So, for productivity, I personally rate having a few days a month set aside for face-to-face time but the rest mostly free of distractions far higher than having a few hours of useful work every day but also getting interrupted by multiple calls and such throughout that time.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, since spontaneous conversation encourages creativity. The real problem is signaling what state you're in. Everyone looks the same on a computer, so it's hard to tell who's in the zone and who's available.

What if we took a huge glass conference room and dedicated it as a 'quiet do not disturb room'? No talking at all, and the only movement is entering/exiting. When people see you in there, it's a giant visible signal that you're probably not responding to Slack/email/etc because you're doing something and don't want to be disturbed.

i am picturing an open office full of people wearing VR headsets and i am kind of freaking out a little, because that's either the best, or worst thing ever.

Little things that they usually wouldn't pester you for, it pops into their head and turns into a five minute conversation that completely obliterates any thread of concentration from before the interruption.

Also, I fully agree re: desk passing, it's so difficult to ignore this... particularly because if you _do_ manage to get in the zone and not notice the office traffic, there's inevitably somebody who comes to stand just a little behind you and to the side, hovering there waiting for your attention. It's startling when you notice them.

The current place at is a lot smaller and more chilled out and it seems to really make a difference. I don't have a phone because everyone I would talk to is in the same room with me, and I've received 6 emails so far this year for the same reason. Anything work related goes into chat so we can check back on it later, things that are more permanent go in jira/confluence, and that's that.

The amount extra work I get done is insane. I could probably do 2 hours at this job to every 8 at the last place.

But Re: assuming frequent interruption reflects negatively on performance, that is contrary to my own experience. I'm trying as hard as I can to rule myself out when I say this, but my friends and coworkers all suffer from more interruption the more knowledgable they get, and the more valuable they become to the company. This is one of the most damaging aspects of interruption culture IMO -- it often hurts the people most capable and willing to help the most.

BTW, I learned a good hard lesson about this. I had a long ongoing argument with one of my first managers that I could get 25% more work done if he'd just leave me alone until the end of the week, and that it was too much overhead and interruption for me to show my progress twice a day. I was working in CG films, and they wanted twice-daily renders of our shots.

I was wrong. Managers need status. Not twice a day for most code work, that's not normally reasonable, but on a basis more frequent than coders want to provide them ... it has to be before the work is done, not when they feel ready to present.

The reason is because everyone in a room can agree after an hour of talking in detail, on precisely what needs to happen, and then a week later find out that every single person in the room actually had a different idea.

It pays dividends to proactively provide the status managers need before they ask for it. Fend off the unexpected or interrupting status pings, and give them what they need.

Is this from a book or research? If it is I'd love to know where I can go read more about it.

Because if there's no outward way for someone to tell whether it's okay to ask you a question or not, you're just being an asshole.