Ever been in a wormhole of creative thought when a well-meaning coworker appears in the entrance to your cube and blurts, ”What did you think about that meeting yesterday?”
You’re startled, and your ingenious thoughts begin to spill, shattering into pieces around you.
This scene - The Interruption - happens millions of times a day in offices across the U.S. If The Interruption were a TV show, it would be on Nick at Nite every night. Like our favorite reruns, we know all the words, all the choreography. The Interruption is a visit from a well-meaning, though idiotic, sister-in-law who should know better, but just doesn’t.
It’s not her fault. How does a coworker know when it’s safe to step into our cube, or when it’s not? Are emails welcomed after 9 PM, or not?
Seems we need to reinvent the red-bandana-on-the-door-handle, the signal to our college roommate that we were, um, entertaining, and preferred to be left alone.
When our 2EO, Marti, was officing without a door, she hung this sign whenever she wanted to tell people to Bugger Off: 
It says, ”I’m focusing. Did you know that it takes people between four and 15 minutes for a person to get back in flow after they’ve been interrupted at work? Please don’t interrupt my flow right now.”
But it’s not always people who interrupt us. Phones vibrate. Email and IM ping. The iChat icon bounces, luring us to virtual watercoolers with coworkers across the globe.
Some companies are creating new policies to fight The Interruption:
- US Cellular has No Email Fridays
- At least one workgroup at Microsoft is committed to twice-monthly No Meeting Fridays
- In August, a group of Intel enginners began piloting Quiet Time every Tuesday morning.
Whether it’s engineered solitude or a ban on email, all of these policies point in the same direction: fewer interruptions, whether in-person or electronic, so that we can all spend more time in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow.
What do you - or your work teams - do to stay in flow? Let us know, but for goodness sake, don’t send me an email. I’m focusing.
More: Check out this White Paper from Monday Morning, “Infomania: Why we can’t afford to ignore it any longer”
