How To Stay Productive When Bombarded By Interruptions

This is a guest post by Chris Bowler.

I recently returned to work after four months of parental leave. Four months does not seem like a long time, but it was long enough that I forgot about some of the aspects of working on a larger team in the same physical location. Specifically, I had forgotten just how many interruptions there are at the office. In comparison, even three kids at home were no match for the number of interlopers appearing at my office door. How does a person remain productive in the face of these distractions? What I’m going to say here is common sense, but I needed to remind myself of these ideas and thought other folks could use them as well.

Reduction
Simply put, the best way to deal with interruptions is get rid of them completely. But, unless you are willing to live the rest of your life as a monk in the Himalayas, this is a nearly impossible task. However, reducing the sheer number of interruptions is a good thing. How do you do this? First you have to look at the source of each interruption – there are those from others people (coworkers, friends, children) and then there are those where we are our own worst enemy.

Self-induced distraction
You’ve been working for ninety minutes since lunch and have made some progress on a project. Why not reward yourself with one more game of Scrabble on the iPhone? Well, unless one of your goals for the day is to play X number of games of Scrabble, you’re choosing to not move forward on any of the projects you have made a priority. Does that scenario sound familiar? We are often our own worst enemies in being productive. This has been talked about in so many places around the internet the last couple of years, but a lot of us are still struggling, so here is a list of ways to prevent ourselves from being our own worst enemy:

• Shut off email notifications – check email at regular intervals.
• Shut off IM applications – for emergencies, keep your cell phone close.
• Shut off Twitter (sacrilege, I know) – seriously though, we all love Twitter, but it IS a distraction. Shut it off when working on important tasks and, like your email, catch up on the latest happenings of the Twitterati at regular intervals through the day (this goes for sites like Facebook and Digg too).
• Limit your RSS access – nothing can kill your time like an impromptu browsing session of your favorite blogs. Check your RSS after hours.
• Reduce those ‘rewards’ – we all needs breaks, so the occasional game of Scrabble is acceptable, but be disciplined. If you start rewarding yourself after every successful 15 minutes of straight work, productivity may not be achievable. Limit the rewards to completing several hours of straight work.

Interruptions from others
There are a few things you can do to dissuade others from distracting you:

• Close your door – if you work from home, this is mandatory for good chunks of the day. If you work in an office environment, closing the door will also stop a good percentage of the folks looking for you. Every preventative measure counts.
• Work from a remote location – if your superiors permit this, work occasionally from home or from the local cafe. If people have work related issues that require your attention, email and your cell are there for use. But from being physically absent, you remove the idle chit-chat and water cooler talk that can take up so much of the day.
• Don’t pick up that phone – voicemail is an amazing piece of modern technology and the problem with phone calls is you don’t know how important each one is until after you answer. Instead, let the caller leave a message and you can decide what the priority is. And just like closing the door, a lot of people won’t bother leaving a message, meaning their reason for calling wasn’t actually that important.

By simply reducing the interruptions coming your way, you are setting yourself up for increased productivity. Organization is a key component to completing work, and that goes for your environment as well as your work and your tools. Consider the ideas above as measures you can take to keep your environment organized.

Getting back in the zone
Reduction by prevention is important, but we have to be realistic here. Interruptions will occur, and when they do, you need a plan to get back on track. Here are a few tips for keeping the ‘zone’ within reach:

• Break your projects into small tasks – this is repeated often nowadays. Goals should be attainable and projects should be made up of small, concrete tasks. And by having well defined tasks, you have the ability to more easily return to what you were doing when an interruption occurs.
• Keep a log – do you ever have those moments where you’ve just had an interruption or two, and after the offenders have left, you stare blankly at the wall saying, “Now where was I?” It happens. And if you are not able to immediately return to productivity nirvana, documentation is your best friend. Having a log of what you did during the day can be indispensable.
• Be organized – it isn’t any simpler than that. Getting into or back into the zone will always be hard if your work and tools are not organized. A clean inbox, email inbox and project/task list make getting to work easier.

Just give in
Occasionally, the best thing to do will be to give up on your planned tasks and go with the flow. Priorities shift constantly, sometimes within a very short time frame. There will be those days when everything you had planned will have to take a backseat to the emergency of the day. When that happens, show off your ability to ride the wave of unforeseen requests with calm certainty. It’s not going to do you or anybody else any good if you can’t let go of your plan for the day.

Interruptions are a part of life. Do your best to reduce them as much as you can, and have a strategy for dealing with the rest. It might just help you to check a few more of those tasks, and help you keep sane and joyful while doing it.