In the olden days, as soon as a fax was received, a secretary would burst into the manager’s office and exclaim “you’ve received a fax”.  All activity would stop until the fax was addressed.

While we rarely receive faxes anymore, many of us exhibit this same strange behavior when we receive an email. We have a compulsion to open the email, then read it. And then we do something about it (interrupting our current work), or we decide to get to it later (and often let it fall through the cracks.)

We spend time scheduling our days (and nights) with meetings, conference calls, client pitches, and the like. Reasonably, we then fill in the time between these events either doing preparation or follow-up. Unfortunately, we can never be as effective as we could be – interruption makes this impossible.

Instead, schedule time well in advance of the event, for preparation and follow-up. This means blocking time in your calendar so that no one can book you. Once you’ve scheduled this time, then disconnect from everything else: log out of email, log out of instant messaging, turn off Social Media, turn off your smartphone, and put your office phone on “do not disturb”. If you have a door to your office, close it. If your job is filled with interruptions by definition, then choose one hour at a specific time of the day (eg early morning, after the markets close, etc) to do your prep and follow-up. Then disconnect.

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