Inoculating against Interruptions

Maybe it’s really an interruption, and maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s your job.

Maybe much or most of what you do every day could be considered interruptions. The general nature of it might be unplanned, but it’s not unintentional. Your job is the way it is because people – including you – decided to make it that way.

That doesn’t mean you sat down and created a helter-skelter strategy for your work. Strategy usually isn’t done that way, however much we may try. Our habitual performance in the workplace is, for each of us, the product of countless decisions about what to do in response to competing priorities.

Interruptions & Disruptions

Visualize this: You’re finally into some complicated and challenging thing, and you’re making headway. Then a co-worker heaves into your cube, urgent with deadline-induced desperation. You care about the person, and you have the necessary answer.

The rescue may take just a few minutes, but you can almost physically feel the momentum being sucked out of your workday. When you wheel around to resume the more-important work, you face more than just reconnecting with the loose pieces. You have to reset this matter as a priority, and you have to patch a hole in your confidence. Can I EVER get anything done?

When Conflict Strikes

Who likes conflict, enjoys conflict?

We all know people who relish it, or seem to. Most of us don’t want anything to do with it. We dread it.

We fear even the possibility of conflict, and typically make every effort to avoid it. If there is some possibility it will occur, we depart the scene. We recoil when it erupts, flee it when we can.

Everything's a Problem

To a practical optimist, everything’s a problem. That’s why that kind of working optimist is so good at solving them.

Wait a minute, wait a minute. Problems are bad, not good. Problems mean things aren’t working, and there’s cost and damage. If you see everything as a problem, you’re a pessimist, not an optimist. Right?

Congress, the Project

          The United States Congress has a problem. Its approval rating in the polls is about 9 percent. The nation’s citizens are mostly contemptuous of how the senators and representatives conduct their business.

          So. Big problem for you if you’re one of the 535 senators and representatives, right?

No.

Conflict, My Friend

           Embrace conflict. Encourage conflict. Demand conflict.

          Wait a minute. That whole idea is absurd. Conflict is at the least a distraction, and at worst severely destructive, in projects and in the everyday workplace.

Screwing Up Is Quicker

          There’s a story about an efficiency study done in a newspaper office. An expert stood behind a sportswriter with a clipboard as the guy was on the phone. The sportswriter finished the call, rattled off a report and was about to shoot it into production.
          “Wait a minute,” the efficiency man interrupted. “How long did that take?”
          The answer: “Ten years and ten minutes.”

           Screwing up and earning success have this in common: They both take time. The difference is that one takes very little time, while the other can take a lot.