Cutting down on interrupts with office hours

Maintaining focus throughout the work day is difficult, especially when your team expects you to be available at all times. In particular, it is especially hard if you are prone, like me, to enter reactive mode: I know people are expecting things of me, so it’s easy to enter a flow of just watching my inbox and chat rooms to see what things need attention—instead of pausing and deciding what to do on my own.

This was already a problem for me pre-COVID, but has gotten much worse in my case due to the WFH situation. Months ago, when I was in the office, email was indeed a big source of distraction, but I didn’t pay much attention to the team’s chat. Some days I even forgot to log in, and that was alright because if anyone needed anything from me, they could stop by and ask me in person.

But with the move to working from home, I made an extra effort to be present in chat. I wanted my team to feel like I was around for questions as I had been in the past. Unfortunately, this has devolved in me having the chat and email windows open and visible continuously. Consequently, my attention is fragmented among them and I have difficulty to quiet the mind and do actual work.

So. I’ve been trying something different over the last couple of weeks.

I’ve cut off chat for the majority of the day and I’m now signing in only when I specifically want to be available to help others. I’m adding those time blocks to my calendar so that people know when to interact with me, and I’m planning on being available on video instead of chat so that we can discuss things quicker. Think about this as “personal office hours”. Troubleshooting a problem someone is having with their code over chat is very inefficient.

I think this has been working fine so far, but sticking to this is going to be the difficult part.

But remember: interrupts are how you end up doing work to fulfill the plans other people have. They are not part of your plans. And I understand it’s very difficult to get out of the reactive spiral, but it seems so worth it…