Elimination Part 3: Interrupting Interruption and the Art of Refusal
Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. - Ralph Charell
An interruption is anything that prevents the start-to-finish completion of a critical task, and there are three principal offenders; time wasters, time consumers, and empowerment failures. Let's look at each in turn to see how we can help prevent interruption.
Time Wasters
Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace. - Robert Sawyer
Those things that can be ignored with little or no consequence. Common time wasters include meetings, discussions, phone calls, web surfing, and e-mail that are unimportant.
These are the easiest to eliminate and deflect: Simply limit access and funnel all communication towards immediate action. Try to avoid meetings that do not have clear objectives.
Time Consumers
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. - Annie Dillard
Repetitive tasks or requests that need to be completed but often interrupt high-level work. Here are a few you might know intimately: Reading and responding to e-mail, making and returning phone calls, customer service, financial or sales reporting, personal errands, all necessary repeated actions and tasks.
Time-consumers consume time because they tend to interrupt other activities, leading to inefficiencies associated will small scale actions. Batching such tasks to the end of the day avoids distraction and makes the process of completing them more efficient.
Empowerment Failures
The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what's going on so they can do a lot more than they've done in the past. - BIll Gates
Instances where someone needs approval to make something small happen. Here are just a few: fixing customer problems, customer contact, cash expenditures of all types. Both being micromanaged, or are micromanaging someone else, costs your time. In general it’s not scalable because there is a decision bottleneck.
To solve this try to empower others to act without interrupting you. Limit access to your time and force people to define their requests before spending time with them. Going further, by using automation (and out-sourcing) you can empower automata to make decisions in your place.
Topic: Motivation Monday #19 (Read 1203 times)
