Books from the 70s on time management always make two key suggestions for how to stop people interrupting you when you're trying to work: close the door to your office and get your secretary to screen your phone calls. This would be brilliant advice, except I don't have a door; I'd get my secretary to go and buy me one, but I don't have a secretary, either. As a result, I am extremely busy, and regrettably have no time to take what would be the most cathartic action - ie, hunting down and killing the person who first suggested that open-plan offices might be a boon to productivity.
Besides, trying to eradicate interruptions doesn't always make sense. Even more recent books counsel shutting yourself off from sources of distraction - Never Check E-mail In The Morning, by Julie Morgenstern, is one very readable example. But many of us these days work in jobs that behavioural scientists describe as "interrupt-driven", where responding quickly to messages and requests is part of what we're paid to do: try telling a call-centre worker (or an investment banker, or a journalist) to take the phone off the hook for an hour. What we need are guerrilla tactics for managing office interruptions, and the personal-development gurus, of course, are happy to oblige:
1 Apply the "two-minute rule": I've mentioned before this preposterously simple idea, from the author David Allen, which really might change your life: deal immediately with all interruptions that you think can be dispatched in two minutes. (Write down the others and process them later.) Crucially, two minutes is short enough not to lose a feel for the work you were engaged in. This is important, given the findings of psychologist Mary Czerwinski, an "interruption scientist" (no kidding) whose clients have included Nasa: 40% of the time, office workers who get distracted from a task don't return to it when the interruption ends.
2 Use visual buffers to reduce face-to-face interruptions: a potted plant or stack of books on your desk need not literally block colleagues, as the organisational coach Jan Jasper points out: people respond surprisingly sensitively to symbolic cues. I've started wearing an outsized pair of headphones; amusingly, they can be very obviously plugged in to nothing at all, and you'll still be left alone.
3 Stop interrupting yourself: if surfing the web is a major source of distraction, adjust your browser's preferences so your homepage is Get Back To Work, by blogger Mark Taw (marktaw.com/getbacktowork.htm), a page that a) tells you in very large letters to get back to work, and b) includes a clever system for clarifying and monitoring the work you're meant to be doing. There's plenty of evidence to show that any kind of self-monitoring, even just keeping a time log, massively reduces the time spent in the depressing limbo that is neither focused work nor real relaxation.
There are other techniques for stopping people bothering you. But they're not for the weak-hearted, and may have negative consequences for your social acceptability. Roquefort cheese. At your desk. That's all I'm saying for now.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
