Fear No Interruptions: Eliminate the Impact of Interruptions on Your Team

It’s 8:30am and your key team member is just getting into their most important task for the day when they get a meeting invite for 8:45am and a direct message saying “Can please jump on this call? We really need you!” Your team member immediately feels tension, wanting to be helpful to teammates, and wanting to make the most important task happen. She takes the meeting, interrupting her most important task, is physically present on the call but mentally feeling the weight of the important task being delayed, but ends the meeting feeling stressed and distracted.

Welcome to the modern workday.

Interruptions are stressing out your team & killing your results

Constant pings, unscheduled meetings, and urgent requests are standard practice in the modern workday. Your team members and their priorities are sacrificed at the alter of “being available”, leading to consistent interruption.

Interruptions are simply context switching, causing your team member to boot up a whole different context, adding to all the things that are already in their brain. Each interruption, however minor it seems, requires time to recover from and return to the original task at hand. We know from research that context switching can cause someone to lose as much as 40% of their productive time each day. 40%! You might as well light dollar bills on fire.

This hit on productivity is less actual time to complete work, meaning either low quality rushed work, delayed timelines, or extended work hours, each increasing the stress your team members feel throughout their days, which they also take into their evenings and weekends.

IT IS NOT a priority issue: We interrupt each other for important reasons

At the heart of most interruptions is a very simple incentive: make a priority happen. If I have a priority task on my list, and you have the information I need to accomplish that task, I have no choice but to ping you. My intent is not to interrupt you, it’s simply the only way for me to get my task done. I understand you also have priorities, I just don’t have any other way to get mine done.

Most interruptions are for important reasons: immediate client needs, critical decision-making, or collaborative efforts that require input from multiple team members to weigh in. The issue is not that team members do not respect each other's priorities but that the work environment has not been structured to accommodate the dynamic nature of today's tasks effectively.

IT IS NOT a resources issue: Every new team member makes the issue worse

As interruptions impact our ability to make priorities happen, the temptation is to add more team members to decrease workloads. However every team member you add only makes interruptions worse. Here’s why: each additional team member increases the complexity of communication and coordination required. Every new team member is one additional person with priorities and needs from other team members (aka potential interruptions). The illustration below from Lighthouse perfectly illustrates this.

IT IS a planning issue: The impacts of Interruptions are 100% avoidable with a solid plan

Fact: you CANNOT eliminate interruptions. The modern workplace is too unpredictable, and the pace of business makes interruptions inevitable.

Given that, the logical approach is to plan for interruptions, allowing team members to maintain their personal priorities while being open to supporting team or client needs.

Here’s a step by step guide to make that happen:

Step #1: Mandate Whirlwind Time

Mandate your team to designate 20 to 40% of their day to “Whirlwind”: tasks that are unpredictable but necessary for the day-to-day operations of the team. This should be time blocked on the calendar, ensuring your team members don’t over schedule their day (which also increases their potential stress). During Whirlwind Time, team members can handle urgent needs, daily requests from clients or the team, respond to email, etc. This dedicated time ensures that the majority of the workday is protected for focused, strategic work. Team members can spread it throughout their day as they prefer, they just need to get it to their calendar.

Whirlwind actually has MANY additional benefits, fully detailed in the Time Boss Weekly Operating System Masterclass (it’s free!)

Step #2: Give Permission to Defer Interruptions till Whirlwind

Empower team members to defer responding to interruptions that are not immediate emergencies until the next scheduled Whirlwind Time. This helps maintain focus on current tasks without ignoring the needs of the team or clients.

This becomes incredibly valuable when the entire team is aware that each team member has Whirlwind time. Each interruption can include the urgency level, allowing the team member to defer to Whirlwind, or decide to handle the interruption now. “This can wait till Whirlwind” will become a kind and welcomed phrase used by your team.

Encourage your team to use a Daily List to quickly jot down any interruptions that can be deferred. This list serves as a temporary parking lot for new inputs, keeping them out of mind until Whirlwind. This reduces mental clutter, allowing team members to focus on one task at a time without losing track of new requests.

Side note: The Daily List is an incredible tool when combined with the entire Time Boss Weekly Operating System.

Step #3: Equip Your Team with a Toolbox to Recover from Unavoidable Interruptions

As mentioned above, some interruptions will be unavoidable. To eliminate the impact from the interruption, your team needs a toolbox to quickly regain focus. Here’s some items to get you started:

• Take Good Notes to Reduce “Come Back” Time :: Good note-taking reduces "Come Back Time," the period required to restore context for a task after an interruption. Before switching tasks, spend a few minutes to note your current thoughts, key points, and next steps on the task.
• Use Whirlwind to Catch Up :: Whirlwind can serve as a daily buffer for unavoidable interruptions. If your team member was interrupted from 9am to 10am by an emergency, they can regain that lost hour during Whirlwind time. They are simply “time trading” those hours.
• Ask for Permission to Be Offline to Catch Up :: If Whirlwind isn't enough to catch up on deferred tasks, ask for permission to go offline to work undisturbed for a set period. This is particularly effective for tasks that require deep focus, ensuring they are completed without further interruptions, and decreasing the total time needed to complete the work.
• Scope Down Tasks :: Parkinson’s Law says that a task will expand to fill the time we give it. This means we may be able to complete work in less time if we simply constrain the time we alot to it. If a team member loses an hour to an unavoidable interruption, they may be able to scope down other tasks on their schedule to accommodate, without impacting results.
• Backlog Tasks :: Unavoidable interruptions ARE your priorities, otherwise they would be avoidable. Had your team member known this interruption was coming during their Weekly Planning Meeting, they would have blocked it on their calendar, and not planned on other work accordingly. Given that, sometimes the best thing to do is simply Backlog tasks that no longer fit this week, and reprioritize them next week during the Weekly Planning Meeting (full details on this available in the The Time Boss Weekly Operating System Masterclass)
• Add Inventory Time Slots: WARNING: ensure your team members do this sparingly, and only if they have a timeline commitment to uphold. If time cannot be recovered during the workday, allow your team members to cautiously add specific inventory time slots to make up for the lost time. For instance, if an unexpected call consumes two hours, they can plan to recover this time by extending their workday by two hours, or plan to work two hours this evening after eating dinner and spending time with friends and family. The time should be scheduled, it should only support the delayed task, and it should not be repeated once done. Your team members risk acclimating to extending their work day, only increasing their stress level. You might even consider requiring them to get permission to do so, ensuring it is not overused.

Navigating Interruptions is a Key Part of Your Weekly Operating System

Navigating interruptions and maximizing your Whirlwind are just two parts of a cohesive Weekly Operating System that protects your priorities and allows you to rest and recover, such as Time Boss. If you don’t have a Weekly Operating System you trust, check out the recording of the The Time Boss Weekly Operating System Masterclass. In 90 minutes, you’ll learn the Operating System that is helping so many people make massive progress without impacting their mental health.

One more thing: If you’re ready to dive into the deep end of the pool, jump into the next Time Boss Cohort with 4 other leaders looking to permanently adopt the Time Boss model. The next cohort launches March 4th and has 3 spots left!  Here you’ll also find an employer reimbursement request form to more easily secure your spot.