Good leaders do their best to prevent distractions and avoid interruptions.
Once interrupted while engaged in a task, it takes several minutes to fully reengage and become hyper-focused on the task at hand. Interruptions and unnecessary distractions are the curse of productivity. In a fun turn of words, the best advice is not to let interruptions interrupt you.
Giving your full attention to tasks and decisions is the pathway to quality. Superior work requires leaders to work with heightened concentration and focus for blocks of time. Forty-five minutes of deep work, where leaders can attend exclusively to a task, is the very definition of productive time.
But no matter how much planning goes into eliminating distractions and arranging the physical work environment to enhance focus, people (and pets) interrupt the flow. They take leaders off task with requests, questions, and noise. As annoying as these intrusions are, some leaders have learned a special secret.
Once interrupted, it often makes the most sense to give the source of the disturbance your full attention. If it’s going to take a few minutes to redeploy your focus anyway, why not achieve the equally important goal of doing what leaders are meant to do: focus on the problems and issues of others.
Giving the interrupting party your full attention for a moment or two makes perfect sense given the fact that you can’t restart your own focus instantly. Try as you might, most intrusions require recovery time. Using this delay to focus exclusively on the interrupting party sends a wonderful message that other people and their issues count.
This attention often prevents another interruption in the short term, as fully answering the question or attending to the need eliminates the root cause for the interference. Even taking the time to give noise your full attention by eliminating that noise from intruding again seems like a smart use of time.
Waving off interruptions or doing your best to ignore them makes a lot of sense in many situations. Once in the flow of concentrated effort, some interruptions don’t make a big enough dent to make disengagement necessary. But when they do, ask yourself if it would be better to give the source of the interruption your full attention.
You might find it is even more important than the task you’re working on. In that case, you’ve made a great leadership call.
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