170 | 4 Ways to Stay Focused At Work and Handle Interruptions

If you find yourself being constantly interrupted at work while you're trying

to get an important project done, or you're trying to tackle your long to-do

list, I know it can feel frustrating and difficult to handle, and I just

want to take a moment to reassure you that you are definitely not alone.

I have a weekly email newsletter that I send out every Friday, and in one of the

newsletters earlier this year, I asked everyone if they could reply to let me

know what their biggest challenge was when it came to managing their time, because

I've been thinking about recording this episode for ages, and I wanted to make

sure it would be as helpful as possible.

And just to make sure I was focusing on the right things, the

answer came back loud and clear.

The biggest challenge by far was constant interruptions at work.

One person even said that, "The nature of HR is have you got a minute?" And

I thought that summed it up perfectly.

I can vividly remember being in my former HR roles and having a stream of people

coming up to my desk to ask questions or sending me messages asking for help.

And because a lot of the time we're in HR because we want to help people, we want

to make sure they have a good experience at work, it can feel hard saying no.

It's so easy to find that you start the day with the best of intentions to get

an important piece of work done, but by the time you're logging off from your

computer at the end of the day, that thing is still sitting on your to-do

list because you were pulled away from working on it or distracted from working

on it by the interruptions that happened.

So in this episode, I want to share a few things that I hope will really

help to put boundaries in place that mean you'll still have time to answer

queries and you'll still have time to support people at work who come to you

for help, but you've also got protected key chunks of time for focused work where

you aren't interrupted and distracted.

If you're a regular listener or watcher of the show, thank you for being here.

It's great to have you back again.

And if you're new to HR Coffee Time, hello, and welcome.

I'm your host, Fay Wallis.

I'm a career and leadership coach with a background in HR, and I specialize in

supporting HR and people professionals to have successful and fulfilling

careers through this HR Coffee Time podcast, through my Inspiring HR

Leadership programme, and also through the Essential HR Planner So let's

dive into four practical tips to help stop you getting interrupted so often.

You may, of course, already be using some of these tips, or it might be that

you've heard of them before and thought, "Oh, yes, I must give that a try," but

maybe you've never quite got round to it.

So it's my hope that by the end of this episode, you'll have at least one thing

that you can put into action, that you decide you want to put into action, that's

going to make a really big difference and helps you get through your most

important work and your busy to-do list.

So tip number one is to reduce the number of interruptions by introducing set open

door hours during the day or the week, these being set times that people are

welcome to come to you with queries.

If you do this, the challenge is going to be sticking to them, so you'll

need to make sure that you communicate to everyone what these hours are and

why you're putting them in place.

You can have the information at the bottom of your email signature.

If you have an on-site office, you can stick a sign up with

information on the door.

And again, you could put a sign by your desk if you wanted to.

And one thing that can really help with this, if you find it hard to say no, even

though you've told everyone and everyone knows about your open door policy, what

can really help is to have some wording ready, and that wording is there ready for

you to say when someone interrupts you.

So instead of going to a default response of, "Oh, yes, of course, I'll stop working

right now," instead you have something like, "I'd be really happy to help, but

I'm in the middle of something right now.

I can speak to you about this at 3:00.

Shall I put a time in the calendar for us to have a catch-up then?"

Just having that little sentence, that little bit of wording ready to use can

make a really big difference and help stop you from leaping in to help straight

away and getting pulled away from the important work that you're doing I really

remember an engineer that I worked with, and he used to have a big red sign on

his desk that had wording along the lines of, "Working on a critical project.

holding his boundaries around this.

We all knew that there was absolutely no point even trying to speak to him when

the red sign was up, but we also knew that he would happily be interrupted

the minute that it reached the time he said he'd be available on the sign.

So I think there's a lot to learn from him really.

I think the fact that we knew he'd be fine with us going up to him later

meant that you did still approach him, and you didn't just think, "Oh, come

on, can't you just fit me in for... I've got this quick question for you

quickly." So that's tip number one.

While we move on to tip number two, one thing I think I should point out

that's really important is the fact that although this is something you

personally might be finding difficult, having these constant interruptions, I

can guarantee that there'll be lots of other people in the organization you

work for who will be finding it hard to get to their important work too.

We've all worked with people who complain that they're in meetings

all day, and the only time they have to get any work done is the evening.

Or we've also worked with people who say that as soon as they sit

down to do something, they get interrupted, like you might be finding.

One of the many brilliant things about working in HR is that

hopefully you have got sway and influence over working practices

throughout the whole organization.

So if you suggest implementing some company-wide initiatives to help

stop interruptions and distractions, you won't just be helping yourself.

You'll have a lot of very grateful and hugely relieved colleagues

who are thrilled they have more time to focus on their important

works and projects as well.

There are such huge benefits to the organization as a whole if everyone

is less distracted and has more time for what Cal Newport calls deep work.

In his hit book, which is also called Deep Work, he points out that it is this

deep work... And just to explain what that is, so deep work is work where you

can fully focus without distraction.

It is the work that really moves things forward, whether that's things

like strategy, problem-solving, or creating something new.

You need that focus time for it, and it can only happen if

we're not being interrupted.

We have that time to think.

So as it's that type of work that is often going to make the biggest

difference to an organization, it's in the interest of everyone to create an

environment where- Everyone who needs the opportunity to have periods of deep work

can do that without being interrupted.

I have seen in other organisations where they've put some brilliant

initiatives in place to help people have time for focused work.

As an example, Asana introduced no meeting Wednesdays, and they did

that more than a decade ago to give everyone time without distractions.

It's not just about no one having meetings, it's also about not distracting

each other and having focused time to get things done Tip three is another

idea that I was excited to see one of my coaching clients put into practice and

have really big success with it after we talked about it in a coaching session,

and this is to have working meetings, so meetings where the aim is to get work done

instead of just talking about work, which is what normally happens in meetings.

She arranges a time for her whole HR team to be in a meeting room

together with their laptops.

If you have a virtual team, you could easily arrange to do this virtually

too on Teams or Zoom or whichever conferencing tool it is that you use.

She then explains that it's not a typical meeting.

Instead, everyone's going to be using the time to actually get their

work done, and then she goes around everyone in the room and asks them what

they want to get done in that time.

So everyone shares what it is that they want to work on, and then there's an

agreement that they'll all just get their heads down and crack on with that

work for the set amount of time that the meeting is taking place with, so the

amount of time they've all got for it.

Then at the end of that time slot, she then says, "Okay,

everyone, how did we all get on?"

Goes round the room and checks in with everyone.

There is something really powerful about accountability.

If you say you're going to do something, so you tell someone you're

going to do it, and you know they're going to check in on you a little bit

later, it's so much more likely that you're going to get that work done.

And also, if you're all physically at a location together, it's much

less likely that you're going to have people turning up and distracting you.

And to help you do really well at this, I would recommend shutting down all your

notifications so that you can't just spot something flashing up on your phone or

flashing up on your screen that could interrupt you and get you distracted again

And if this feels like familiar advice because you're a longtime listener to the

show, or because you have a copy of The Essential HR Planner, and you come along

to the free monthly planning sessions that I run for all Essential HR Planner

owners, you'll know this is a technique that I personally use all the time.

And I've just found it to be completely life-changing for getting stuff done.

Because unless you've got people with you, in that meeting room with you,

whether that's an online one or an in-person one, it's easy to put slots

in our calendar and say, "Oh, yeah, in that slot in my calendar, I'll

make sure I'm not distracted at all."

But actually, that just doesn't happen.

It's much harder to keep those firm boundaries if we

haven't got accountability.

So that's why I'm a really big fan of having these kind of working meetings, or

they're also called coworking sessions, or some people call them body doubling

as well, where you're both getting on with a similar task at the same time.

Right, let's move on to tip four.

So tip four builds on the idea of actually physically taking yourself away from

your regular desk or making yourself unavailable so that it's impossible for

people to interrupt you and distract you.

I've seen a couple of different HR directors that I've worked with in the

past who have also been coaching clients, who have decided to allocate Fridays

as the day that they work from home.

I mean, obviously, they're lucky they can do this.

I know not everyone gets control over the days that they can work from home, or they

may not be able to work from home at all.

But they both realized that Friday tends to be the quietest day in the office.

They had found it was just really, really difficult to have focused time

during the week where they were in senior-level roles, which meant that

they're often affected by the curse of regular meetings, which means they're

in meetings all the time back to back, or they're being interrupted while

they're at their desks with urgent tasks.

So what they both realized was, "Okay, it's just not going to work

for me to be able to have much dedicated uninterruptable time

during Monday to Thursday when it's just completely busy all the time.

But actually, on a Friday, I'm going to say to everyone,

'This is my work from home day.

This is the day that I just do project work and focused work and deep work.

I am completely available to you Monday to Thursday, but this day is blocked

out for my deep thinking and my project work.'" And they block out the whole day

in their calendar, and everyone knows- that you can't book a meeting with

them then, and it's just so much easier for them to do that because for lots

of people who work part-time, Fridays are often the day that they have off.

For lots of people who don't work part-time, they feel like they're starting

to wind down for the week on a Friday, which means it's far less likely they'll

suddenly come to you with queries at that point that feel really urgent.

There seems to be a real Friday mindset thing that people can often fall

into, so it means that this can be the perfect time for you to crack on and

get your work done distraction-free.

That brings us to the end of the episode.

As a quick reminder, we looked at four different tips to try to stop

interruptions from derailing you at work.

They were Tip number one was to set fixed open-door hours that you clearly

communicate, and you'll have to keep communicating it, by the way, so people

know when they can come to you for help.

Tip number two was to introduce a company-wide policy where

everyone is expected to have focus time to work when no meetings

or interruptions can take place.

And it hasn't got to be a whole day like Asana have done.

It could just be a set time, maybe an hour or two one day in the week.

Tip number three was to start having working meetings as an HR team where

you have dedicated time to all work on the big projects or the deep

work that you need to focus on.

And if you're in a standalone HR role, so you aren't part of a team, you

can always partner up with someone else in the company who would really

benefit from having some focus time as well, and then just do that

with them or do it with their team.

And then finally, tip number four was to consider having one day of the

week, probably a Friday, to work from home and keep your calendar completely

blocked out for your focus time.

If you don't have that opportunity to work from home, or maybe you work from

home all the time and it's actually quite, quite difficult to think of physically

putting yourself in a different place, you could book yourself a meeting room

if you work in an office all the time.

Or if you always work remotely, it may be that that one day of the week you want

to take yourself off to a coffee shop or a co-working space and work from there.

So it's just marking that day out in another way for you as feeling

that little bit different and making it much more likely you're going

to hold and keep that boundary.

I really hope this episode has been helpful, and I would love to know if you

decide to give any of the tips a try.

You can always reach me on LinkedIn or through my website, brightskyhr.co.uk.

It's always great to hear from you, so please do get in touch.

And if you think other people might enjoy this episode and find it helpful too,

I would be hugely grateful if you could help it to reach more people by either

giving it a like if you're watching it on YouTube, it's always very exciting

to see those likes, or by rating and reviewing the podcast if you're listening

to it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Or if you're feeling extra generous, you could even post about HR Coffee

Time on LinkedIn and recommend that other people give it a try too.

If you do go ahead and do any of those things, please do let

me know so I can say thank you.

I truly appreciate your support, and I'm looking forward to being back again in two

week time with the next episode for you.

Have a great couple of weeks in the meantime.