Person, Interrupted

Interruption is the bane of productivity.

I know, I know, I'm not exactly starting with a controversial statement.

I'm sure everyone fundamentally understands that there is a certain type of work that can only be accomplished with a period of interrupted focus, and that that type of work is necessary to actually delivering anything of value.

And yet...

Interruption has been top of my mind recently, mostly because it has been a personal pain point. Pain is good though, it's a motivator, and thus has it motivated me to write this blog post about the topic.

It's going to be part rant and part reflection, like all good stream of consciousness posts, so buckle up.

The most basic form of interruption is the one where you need to focus on a specific thing for a few hours in order to achieve an outcome and you keep getting distracted.

It doesn't really matter what the distraction is (Slack messages, Confluence updates, meetings, humans or animals who want attention), what matters is that you have to drop whatever context you have and shift your focus to something else..

Honestly, this form of interruption isn't too bad, because you generally have no-one to blame but yourself. Yes, the distractions might be coming from elsewhere, but it's really up to you as to how you handle them.

No-one is going to be too unhappy with you if you disconnect for a few hours in order to get something done. You just need the discipline to shut yourself off from all those sources of interruption and switch into a focus mode, resurfacing at some point later in the day to catch up on everything that you missed.

The more advanced form of interruption is when you have a list of things to do, but that list keeps changing on a day-by-day basis.

A little bit of task reshuffling is normal, especially if you're working on something that is still in the process of being explored and understood. It's when you're shifting between tens or hundreds of different topics and domains with no overarching thread anchoring anything together that things start to get painful.

A changing list of priorities is often caused when the people who are supposed to be providing leadership, who are supposed to be providing clear direction for at least a short period of time, are just fundamentally unable to do so, and you're not in a position where you can do that yourself.

The only real way to deal with this is to set very clear expectations with your stakeholders about what you're going to be working on, in what order and why, and to make it excruciatingly clear that every time they want to add something to the pile or change the order of the list, there are costs associated with that.

Frustrating, but manageable.

Unfortunately, interruption doesn't just happen at the individual level.

Teams, hell even entire businesses, can suffer from the negative effects of interruption as well.

In my experience, a team is at it's best when they are aligned on achieving a single goal all the way through to actually delivering the benefit that the goal was intended to deliver, however long that might be.

Making a team work on multiple things can increase the amount that they achieve, but there is a fundamental limit of parallelisation before things start to get less effective, and in my experience, that limit is much lower than anyone thinks it is.

Even worse though, is when a team is working on multiple things and those things change on a semi-frequent basis, leading to constant shuffling of people, which in turn leads to lost context and broken continuity of thought, which leads to generally worse outcomes overall.

That's not to say that a team shouldn't pivot if the need is great, but that sort of thing shouldn't be happening every single week.

Some of the more classic agile methodologies aim to help with this problem by limiting interruption to pre-agreed windows (i.e. sprint boundaries), and if you follow some sort of regular planning cycle (i.e. quarterly planning) you're basically doing the same thing, but with a bigger window.

The good news is that if you have the discipline (and ability) to actually push back on incoming requests and delay them until your next window of opportunity, that can go a long way to mitigating the impact of any interruptive requests.

Unfortunately, at least in my experience, that almost never works.

When the business rocks up and wants something new, something that was unexpected and unplanned for, it can be very difficult to push back on that, and even when you try the response usually ends up being:

I understand your position, now find a way to do it anyway and also deliver all the other things you agreed to deliver at the same time

In fairness, that's the cynic in me talking, mostly because of recency bias, but it helps to vent on the internet, so now I feel better.

To bring this whole rant to a nice neat conclusion, just remember that focus is one of the most valuable resources that you, your team and your entire business has.

Do everything in your power to protect it.

You'll make enemies along the way, but you'll get stuff done and that's really all that matters.