What's Your Plan to Handle Interruptions?

Stop waiting for interruptions to stop before you focus on your priorities.

Interruptions are literally everywhere.

Your phone, Slack, Microsoft Teams, email inbox, knocks at the door, your dog is sick, last minute meetings, stuck in traffic, game goes long. You get the idea.

Not to mention the myriad of digital platforms that are vying for your attention and literally trying to hook you on their product, including whatever social network you’re watching this on.

There are many wills set against you, and each wants your time and attention.

You may think “I just need to eliminate interruptions. Once interruptions are gone I can focus on my priorities.”

But we both know interruptions won’t stop.

A friend of mine says “Chaos is the water we swim in” and you must learn to swim with interruptions.

Here’s what to do instead: create rules to deal with interruptions in the short term to keep focused on priorities, then solve root causes for the interruptions.

Let's start with short term.

Let's say you lost an hour stuck in traffic. Your day is not lost, you just need to find an hour.

What if you asked your teammates, partners or boss for permission to be offline the next few hours to get caught up?

Or what if you looked at what you had prioritized for the day and see if you can scope down some other task to make room?

Ideally you have buffer time built into your day anyway, and you can just use some of that buffer to accomplish the task.

Once you get past the short term challenge, it’s time to solve root causes.

Let's say you have a teammate that keeps interrupting you, constantly distracting you from your priorities.

What if you set a reminder each Friday to ask that teammate if they have any critical needs next week, and that way you can schedule the work instead of waiting to be interrupted.

Or what if you set a daily 10 minute meeting with that teammate to get all their questions answered, so they know with confidence they’ll get time with you and stop interrupting?

Or maybe you just need to get comfortable telling your teammate “No, I’m working on priorities, I’ll have to help you at a later time”. Might sound scary to some of you.

Again, simple rules to solve the short term challenge of an interruption, and simple rules to solve the root cause of the interruption so it doesn’t happen again, or at least happens less.

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If you’re ready to take a next step to lock in your time habits take a look at a 6-Week Time Boss Coaching Cohort or self-paced Peaceful Progress digital course.