Interruptions were historically limited to often-significant dangers or opportunities. If you are farming and a lightning storm approaches, you need to interrupt your plan and seek shelter. If you are walking through the forest and are rushed by a grizzly bear, it suddenly doesn’t matter where you were headed. In the modern world, we are inundated by an unbroken stream of interruptions, and very few of them are worth paying attention to.
Our modern world is not designed around unbroken concentration. We have email, phones, common work areas, and all sorts of other ubiquitous sources of interruption.
As you attempt to focus on each subsequent highest priority task until it is complete, you’ll have to tenaciously protect yourself from interruptions. In every case, ask whether the interruption will better advance your purpose than the task at hand.
Realize that interruptions are the mortal enemy to productivity. Fragmented work is low-efficiency work. Every interruption will significantly reduce the amount of resources you have to focus on the task at hand, and will continue on as a residual attention parasite even after the interruption is completed.
Some changes you can make on your own. For example, you can adopt a habit of refusing to check your email, the news, or social media as a gap-filler. Instead, set times for these activities. You can check your email at the end of the day instead of the beginning. You can check your phone or catch up on the news while eating lunch. When on task, you’ll want to remove these distractions: close your email window, turn off your phone, and do whatever else you need to do to isolate your concerns to the intentionally chosen task at hand. You’ll find that there are very few actual emergencies. Almost nothing will be very different if it needs to wait a few hours, and your overall capability to do nearly everything will vastly improve by putting in these protections. If absolutely necessary, you can create a specific channel to provide a way of getting through, as long as you only share that with people who will respect your specific instructions that it is only for emergencies. This might be an app on your phone that you leave on while everything else is on silent, or even a special email address whose window you leave open on your computer.
Other changes are going to require the support of others. For example, you might be in an office culture where others like to stop by and socialize. You’ll have to explain to people that you are trying to be more efficient, that you’re going to start shutting your door, that you’d like them to only knock in the event of an emergency, and to send an email if it can wait. You might place a sign on your door: “Please contact me by email and set up an appointment unless you need my immediate attention, in which case you should call or knock. I will respond to your email within one business day.” You might do something similar on your phone voicemail: “If this is not an ” emergency, please reach me by email at TOOOOOOOOOOOO.
As you set up barriers for others to engage with you, you may find that there is a lot of resistance, particularly from low productivity people, who will struggle to disentangle your valuation of what they are interrupting you with for your valuation of them personally. You will have to be firm with people. The productivity you gain will make it worth whatever pushback you encounter. In a work environment, you might respond to strong resistance by changing jobs, where you will earn greater peace and pay in an environment that knows what is most valuable. In a friend relationship, you might need to find a new friend. In a family relationship, you might need to ease into the adjustments and allow the evidence of the benefits to provide further support for further changes.