Interruptions !!!!?

It’s a brand new week, early Monday morning.

Imagine this scene:

“You arrive at work,  sit down open your laptop,  inspired, and ready to get stuck in to your work, when the phone rings. You answer it, it’s your boss. He wants you to drop in to his office. Meeting done, back at your desk you are ready to get started again. In walks your colleague from down the hall asking you about a project you both worked on last month. You chat for a bit, she leaves, you are ready to go again, when a couple of your colleagues who sit around you start to chat about either a movie, or a cricket or tennis match or even  recent political happenings. You hear someone make a comment you strongly disagree with, so you can’t help but say your bit. Three hours after you first sat down you open the file to get started. Your stomach rumbles and you get an instant message: “You ready for lunch?”

This is an all too familiar scenario in all modern work places.

Interruptions of this nature have become a part of everyone’s daily work life and they can come in a variety of forms. You are not, contrary to what our mother may have told you, different from the rest of us. We all get distracted. Open-plan designs make it difficult to get things done. It can be hard to block out the noise and activity going on around you. From your boss to your friends, your co-workers to your family, nobody seems to want you to get any work done.

We all get annoyed when a productive moment is interrupted. We all get fed up when scheduled events don’t go as planned. Interruptions cost us valuable time and productivity.  If we  allow trepidation to sneak into our mind at the prospect of distractions, we’ll cripple our productive abilities.

Generally productivity is defined as one’s ability to convert business inputs into utility outputs. However, most of us fine it difficult to get optimum output out of ourselves. Which explains why people work late, burning midnight oil most times staying late, and most times work over the weekend too to meet project deadlines. In spite of all these efforts  most times the output doesn’t match the expectations or so it is made to believe.

Why is there such a great struggle in getting productivity of ourselves.

Let’s explore..

In a very widely circulated piece on the internet and I can recall vividly, the Founder of Infosys Mr. Narayan Murthy’s email to his colleagues a few years ago, And this is how any rational thinker perceived the email.  “If we are constantly staying late and working over weekends, it’s not because there’s too much of work to get done, it’s because we aren’t getting done enough at work.” Several research studies also endorse this view that most of our work gets done late night or early morning. There are other research results that suggest that work gets done working within the stipulated 8-hour daily time and such people are able to balance the other side of life with family, fun etc., which indicates these are people who allow very little or no interruption in their schedule.       

The most important reason why productivity gets affected is because of interruptions. Fearing distractions also fosters

resentment against the ones doing the distracting. Interruption is the enemy to productivity. We need to recognize that we will be distracted sometimes and let’s accept those distractions as opportunities to improve. We can’t stop distractions but we can certainly keep them from taking over our day. Interruptions, will never let us say, “please don’t disturb, this is our time!”

Interruptions cost organizations and its employees valuable time and productivity.

When people talk about “the interruption culture” in today’s workplace, there’s a tone of resignation. It’s as though the interruption culture is immutable – as though interrupters must be permitted to continue their depredations no matter how injurious to productivity, job satisfaction, and work/life balance. What we need to do is to just do our best to shield ourselves from it.

Just for this week, before we start any work, let’s make a note of the work to be done and let’s keep noting the number of times we were interrupted during the work. When we review this at the end of the week we will be amazed by the observation. We can notice that work doesn’t get done when interrupted, obviously, but, post-interruption there’s a drop in efficiency as well, which allows mistakes to creep in.

Interruptions cost not only Productivity, there’s a High Cost in Morale too..

And there’s more: Interruptions are brutal on one’s morale, because it entrains a whole downward spiral of dispiriting developments.

First, there is the diversion itself, taking us off the task after have assembled the resources and thinking necessary for that particular task. Then there is the restart — reassembling the resources, thoughts, and readiness. There is the loss of momentum caused by the initial distraction from the original purpose. There is growing frustration from having to rebuild those pathways, which dissipates the energy and enthusiasm that work thrives on. (The third time we take up a task after being interrupted, is our creativity at the same level it was the first time?) Interruptions often contribute to errors, creating quality problems and re-work. And above all there is distress—irritability, worry, and the added pressure of having less time to do what they’ve been trying to get done.

This is a very common occurrence in companies engaged in software development,  where people admit being interrupted. At the time of integrations there are a lot of bug reports from QA as “bugs.” Then the rush starts to go back and rectify the errors, upload it on the server, back for QA reviews.  Many projects go through several iterations before it goes to the client. And Murphy’s Law takes over. Invariably some things just don’t work in the place they need to work, so the client shoots back a mail to the Project manager, who then has to go through the entire cycles. All this permits a churn of its uninhibited way across your enterprise?  Result over run of projects. Obvious therefore that clients do not pay for those extra costs, and that brings down the profitability too. Imagine this happening over several hundreds of projects being developed by several hundreds of people. The loss is colossal. Root cause, “interruptions.”

There’s “a competitive culture” out there, too, but would we let our competitors come inside our headquarters and roam around unchallenged?

Why grant a pass to interrupters? 

There are two good reasons interruptions are tolerated:

1. People honestly don’t realize how costly and insidious interruptions are.

2. They don’t know how to curtail interruptions in a professional way.

We must remember that we can’t get meaningful things done when we repeatedly start, pause start pause. Instead we should get into an “alone zone.” It’s in these stretches of alone time when we are most productive. When we don’t have to shift our mind between various tasks, that, we get loads of work done. Ever thought about this fact: We  get to read more pages in our books when we are on a flight, since we there’s zero distraction from outside (this assuming the co-passenger in the next seat isn’t snoring or trying to engage us in a conversation).

A tested, and time proven evidence of successful “alone time” period means letting go off the addiction to connections and communication.   

Getting into the “alone zone,” takes time, assertiveness and discipline.

During the “alone time,” we need to give up on instant messages, phone-calls, emails and meetings. We need to just shut ourselves up from all distractions. We could find it difficult after getting used to this, but, when we make a determined effort, we will surprise ourselves as to how much more get’s done.  

It’s like an aircraft that takes time to ascend to a certain altitude for a long cruise, once it’s there it’s on an auto-mode for a fair amount of time ticking away several nautical miles to takes us to the destination.       

We can plan for Interruptions, by reaching agreements with colleagues on the ways and means by which we intend keeping our communication with them that includes, the time, the media (best preferred would be by an email, which need not necessarily invoke immediate response, unless specified pertinently).    

Let the other’s know our schedule, with enough clarity as to when we are likely to be available for meetings, calls or whatever.  This done the advantage is that we set boundaries within which we intend operating. It’ll also indicate the amount of professionalism we bring to the workplace and the value we place on the commitment for our deliverable and productivity. We could even indirectly be sending a message to the others that they too would benefit immensely doing things in this manner. We could be good examples of restoring some order in the ‘chaos,” that exists in workplaces today.  

Wishing you more happiness, productivity, and work-life balance...