I speak and write a lot about planning and one of the key concepts in perfect scheduling is to allow time when you’re planning your schedule for emergencies and flex time.  Notice I didn’t say, “Interruptions.”

Learning to control interruptions is vital to successful time management.  Interruptions cause us to lose time and gain stress.  Time is money.  If someone approached you and asked for ten dollars, would you give it up? Why, then, are we so willing to give ten minutes of our time?

Most of us, women especially, are afraid of hurting others’ feelings or being perceived as not approachable.  Some even fear that not allowing every silly little question to interrupt their focus will cause them to look bad within the company.  But I’ve found that if you communicate to people why you’re doing something and do it with humor, people are willing to accept it, and will even respect you for it.  Let me give you some specific examples.

1. Wear a unique clothing item – like a chartreuse hat.  It can be anything you like, but tell your co-workers and even your boss(es) that when you’re wearing that item it is not a good time to interrupt you.  You’ll be amazed at how much they respect you for utilizing this concept.  Now, you can’t wear the hat all the time, and it could happen that once you get the point across, if you prefer your uninterrupted time in the morning, say between 8:30 and 10 AM, they just might get into the habit of leaving you alone during that time and you won’t have to wear the ugly thing forever.  Try it.  It works!

1. Put a traffic cone in the “door” to your cubicle. Or something else, more legal, that would get the point across.  This is a little more subtle, so you might have to explain it a few times, but eventually, people will get it.  “When the traffic cone is in the way of your entering my space, it means that it’s not a good time.”

1. Close your door. An open door policy doesn’t make you the doormat.  Just because your company expects you to be available to your direct reports, they don’t want you to lose precious focus time for questions that could be dealt with later.  Again, you can’t leave the door closed all day, but a 90-minute segment will let you get a lot of work done.

1. Put a sign on your door – “Is someone on fire?”  This is where humor comes in to play.  If people don’t get what you’re trying to do, explain to the people who work closest to you that the sign is intended to make the intruder stop and think before interrupting you.  An executive friend of mine tells a story of how he used to say, “Don’t call me unless the building is on fire.”  Then one day, the building really did catch fire.  So he changed it to, “Don’t call me unless someone in the building is on fire.”  Luckily, no calls yet – knock on wood!

1. When someone pops their head into your office and says, “I hate to interrupt . . .”  Respond with, “Then don’t.” They will get the message.  It’s a little more off-putting, but sometimes necessary and it works for the right personality type.

1. Post your schedule. Let people know when would be a good time to come back to talk to you.  Post it on your door or on the frame of your cubicle.  You don’t have to put your actual schedule up if you don’t want, just put something that says, “I’ll be taking interruptions between 11 and 12 today.  I’ll be glad to answer your question if you come back then.”  I used this technique myself several years ago when I worked in a corporate setting and what I discovered that people would do is go back to their cube and e-mail me, which was a more efficient method anyway.  Often, they were coming to me to ask that I send them a certain report.  Duh!  And it’s those needless little things like that that break your concentration and keep you from being as effective as you could be.  But it is up to you to control them.

1. Change your internal voice mail message frequently. This is something else I used to do.  I changed my internal voice mail, the one that only people within the company get when they call me, every morning.  I didn’t explain what I was doing every minute of the day, but I would simply say, “I will be available today from 10:30 to 12:30 if you wish to speak to me personally.  Otherwise, please leave a message, or send an e-mail.”  It worked and I never got chastised for it.  The president of the company came to me one day after getting that message and, (he came, by the way, during the time I had specified!) and asked me to help him word his voice message in a similar manner, both for internal and external calls.  We worded the messages very diplomatically and helped him gain some very important focus time.  My immediate supervisors were very impressed and started using the concept themselves.

Like most other things in life, getting control of interruptions is simply a matter of deciding to do it.  And like most other things in life, it’s always worth it in the end.

Until next time,

Live Joyfully!

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