Ask HN: How do you deal with interruptions in the workplace?
I work as a Product Manager in a 100+ employees startup. I feel that during my work day I constantly get interrupted by colleagues through email, slack or just coming by my desk to make all sorts of questions. I also get this feedback from engineers and designers that feel unproductive some days due to office distractions. Do you have any special strategies or tools to deal with interruptions in the workplace?
31 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 71.8 ms ] threadOne thing I used to do was arrange to work at home two days a week. It was amazing how much more productive I was with no one dropping in every fifteen minutes.
For many other distractions, including my own generally poor focus: I got tested and treated for ADD (after a stupidly long delay).
Properly treating my ADD made a night-and-day difference for my ability to tune out most distractions, and recover from the rest. I'm pretty bummed out that it took me so long to get around to dealing with it; I wasted a lot of my early-career potential because of that.
For my case of ADD, each of the following helps: (1) A good night of sleep, (2) lots of caffeine, (3) Vyvance, and (4) generic Adderall.
Even under the care of a physician, one needs to be careful using something like Adderall: it can lead to over-focusing, resulting in staying on a particular task longer than makes sense.
For intentional distractions: skype, email, etc.: I made a conscious choice that I was okay with not responding to everyone right away. At first that felt rude, but once everyone's expectations regarding my response times were adjusted, it proved to be a net win.
For Slack specifically: (1) I turned off audio notifications on the channels, and (2) If someone really needs to talk to me urgently, they can start a Slack voice call. I don't ignore those.
Another solution is to have a team-wide discussion about people sometimes needing to concentrate, and how everyone will let that happen. If you have a well-functioning team where people care about each other, they should be able to hammer out the details.
Any such team-wide agreement should also account for differences in how people are wired:
- Persons with poor social awareness might require the "I'm busy" signalling to be something they can clearly recognize. I suspect that in most cases, these people want very much to be respectful, but just don't recognize all of the subtle social cues that people have to say, "I'm busy; please don't get my attention."
- Persons who don't perform highly detailed work (especially salespeople, in my experience) tend to have noisy conversations in locations where people need to concentrate. I don't know if it's lack of awareness, or lack of empathy to the frustrations this can cause. But these people must be helped to understand the cost of breaking the concentration of people doing highly detailed work.
I'm curious as to whether Bose would help as I gather noise-cancelling works better for steadyish background noise than sudden transient noises.
- People talking.
- The clothes washer and dryer one room over.
- Someone walking on the hardwood floor above me, wearing hard-soled shoes.
I can't think of any noise which gets through and distracts me, shy of someone walking up to me and intentionally talking to me.
When I'm on an airplane, the headphones significantly reduce engine noise.
Sudden, transient noises don't seem to be a problem.
If I had to make an uneducated guess, I'd say that the quality of "transient" basically implies a high-frequency component to the sound's power spectrum, which these headphones handle just fine.
I can't promise that you'd consider the $300 to be well-spent, but from how you describe your environment, I suspect you'd be pretty happy with these.
I made it clear to my wife and kids that from 8 a.m - 5:30 p.m., it's very important to our livelihood that they consider me to be working and unavailable.
This implies: (1) coming into my office during that time is a felony, and (2) my wife tries hard to keep the kids pretty quiet, and (3) my wife agrees to not take offence if I'm upstairs for lunch and while she's still talking I say "Sorry, I need to work." and head downstairs.
However, often when I come up for lunch, or to use the bathroom, I'll say high to everyone and ask about their day. And sometimes around the time the kids get home from school, I come upstairs to get them a snack and give them a little attention. So it's still way better than me working away from home.
We don't have a great solution for days that the kids are on vacation. My wife and I have agreed that normally on those days, I'll be the one to work around them, rather than vice-versa. So if they're too loud, I'll put on noise-cancelling headphones and/or head out to a coffee shop.
It took a little while for the message to sink into my kids, and there were some minor hurt feelings at first, but now that everyone has adapted I'd say everyone's happy. It's just the new normal.
We are trying some things out.
1. DDDD (do not disturb developer days) twice a week. The general rule is that no one outside the team is supposed to interrupt unless production is on fire. A good idea in principle but it does not seem to be working too well. It is a lot to ask a 100 person company to remember which days they are allowed to interrupt.
2. A developer room with desks and monitors and a door. The idea here is that if you really need uninterrupted focus time the you can relocate you laptop in there and still have a full dev station ready to go. Room for two for pair programming. We will try this in the new year. Outcome is unknown.
3. Yeah, headphones, but that is like putting a screen door on a submarine.
My hypothesis is that a lot of interruptions are simply questions and answers that should live in a Knowledgebase. Get the knowledge in there and then make it searchable. Support dialog like stack overflow does with iteration towards answers/workarounds/ etc.
The behavior should change for all of us employees to turn to a search bar when we have a question about the company, data, or anything (dev or otherwise). We already to that with google, amiright?
My solution to this problem will be to implement a company-wide QA site like stack overflow. We use atlassian products internally, so I will be evaluating their Answers product.
My goal is to package and sell this idea to management in the new year.
I've done this in the past for smaller orgs for b2c on the support side, and it works well (so long As someone inside your org "owns" it. )
I think you will have a hard time distributing this equitably. Since "everyone" wants a private office and needs to focus "all the time" I expect this will go to the person who shows up earliest/has the most social capital to not get kicked out.
And let's not forget about developer on-boarding into enterprise products with lots of technical debt! New devs can benefit greatly from reading threads that rationalize what _seems_ like a bad decision but is reality works well for a number of non-technical reasons...
I feel like quora has the ideal interface for this. At every company I've ever worked for, I've wished that I could deploy a company-local version of it. Incidentally, does anyone here know how Quora makes revenue?
We have "no meeting" days which are meant to keep non-devs from bugging the devs. As a dev I hate them. It's extremely aggravating to actually need a meeting with some other departments to have to wait a couple of extra days to get something straightened out.
Phone (or in person) for 'synchronous' communication where something is immediate.
Email for everything else; answer it 3 times a day and in batches.
Yes, phone isn't as 'easy' as slack, IRC, gchat; that's the point.
Add just a little barrier, and also a little incentive to know you in person.
There's an illusion of immediacy to all these queries. A lot of those calls will turn to emails, and a lot of email threads will turn into "question for you...", "Oh I've worked it out but here's a new question", "oh actually that's fixed now". A little more learning and initiative takes place too.
Phone/person = synchronous Email = asynchronous
Then, there's the rubber-duck effect[1]: the act of writing down your question in a well-organized e-mail can frequently make you realize the answer before you click 'send'. This works for me quite a lot.
And if someone really gets stuck, they can move on to another part of their code that they're not stuck on while waiting for your reply.
Of course, if they're working on something truly urgent, they can always call you on the phone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
https://blink1.thingm.com/
I have keyboard shortcuts to turn it red and green. It's taped to my monitor with a note that asks people not to interrupt me if it's red.
I have a friend who has a script which cycles his light to green for 5 minutes every hour, to give junior devs opportunities to talk to him.
Big, visually-obvious headphones.
Work from home.
The only exception is something critical. If somebody come and ask a question, I tell like "I will answer in 1 hour, is it ok?". In 99.9% of cases the answer is YES
I'd suggest a more targeted approach. For instance what are the typical types of questions they ask you? Next time someone asks you a questions ask yourself
"Do they already know the answer?" - If yes then why do they feel like they need to ask me? What am I doing to give the impression I'm a micro manager.
"Do they not know the answer but you think they should" - Maybe they need to spend more time with the client, or you need to add more people to product management roles decentralize some of the knowledge.
"If I spent more time upfront white-boarding with them would they need to ask me this question?"
Just remember they're asking you questions for reason.