For the next two weeks, we're going to focus on interruptions and how you can minimize the impact they have on your ability to accomplish your administrative tasks, client interactions, strategic planning and thinking/writing/creative projects.

First, we have to be realistic. We can't eliminate interruptions altogether. It would be great if we could tell our clients, customers, vendors, spouses, parents, children and telemarketers, honestly and without concern for retribution, that while we respect/love/frustratingly accept them, they cannot always take priority over everything. It would be great...but it would also be a fantasy. Thus, we must determine which interruptions we will accept before deciding how we will cut the others off at the pass.

To start, identify the difference between urgent and important interruptions. Important and urgent is NOT who can scream the loudest or the longest, whether it’s a client, an employee or a family member. An important and urgent problem has two characteristics. It's:

Pressing—This means it’s deadline-driven, like getting your taxes done by April 15th, or submitting a bid proposal by the drop-dead date.

Has a profound impact (positive or negative) on the future of your business (or personal life, or family) when completed.

To every person interrupting you, his or her issue or crisis is of the utmost importance at that moment. The unbiased truth, however, is that you are very rarely presented with a true crisis – one which is both so pressing and profound in its potential impact that it is deserving of your time and energy THIS VERY MINUTE.

Such interruptions might involve fire, smoke, blood, your mother-in-law arriving, payroll (if an employee uprising is imminent), a sick child (requiring immediate care and not merely pity and affection), a lawsuit (going to court within days) or an angry customer who is about to ask his credit card company for a chargeback or his attorney to start a lawsuit. These are all urgent things that are also important and worthy of you taking time away from your planned priorities.

When presented with such interruptions (and others) we tend to think solely of the consequences of not attending to the crisis or crises at hand; we almost never stop to think about the adverse consequences of dropping the task we were already performing!

Do you recall our discussion on the detrimental impact of multi-tasking? Well, research shows that dividing your focus due to interruptions has the same adverse effects. The Journal of Experimental Psychology and researchers at the School of Information and Computer Science at UC-Irvine found that if you stop working on an intellectually-involving project due to an interruption and return later, your brain needs 15 to 25 minutes to get back to the peak functioning you were at before leaving off.

It’s also why, when you allow your kids or clients to interrupt you in the middle of a task, you find yourself in the middle of the kitchen with no idea why you’re there, or walking away from the photocopy machine (at Kinko's, no less!) with no recollection of leaving your top-secret marketing-genius originals inside. It takes quite a few minutes to regroup, assuming someone else hasn't taken the opportunity to interrupt you!

In worse news, preliminary research from Hewlett-Packard Labs showed that in 41 percent of cases, we never return to our original activity at all, which explains how laundry mysteriously ends up piled on the dining table, how odd charges on vendor bills never get challenged, or how blog posts are sometimes left dangling in the middle of a

;-)

Stopping an interruption (or an interrupter) in its/his/her tracks takes confidence and determination. You have to train yourself to make an immediate evaluation of whether something is actually urgent and important, or just urgent by the interrupter's definition. This may require you to interrupt the interrupter to clarify what they are seeking right this minute--do they need a solution or a sounding board?

I'm not saying that all interruptions are unimportant, of course. We all have good reasons for seeking help immediately: to save time, money, frustration and resources. But you do have to take precautions to limit the interruptions, and when the unpreventable ones inevitably come, you must be prepared to sort the wheat from the chaff.

If it’s urgent but not important, you might be able to delegate it; if it’s important but not urgent, you may be able to postpone it to a time where you can give it greater focus. But if you don’t take responsibility for the interruption and evaluate the what's going on, your perishable resource of time will be lost forever.

Next week, we're going to investigate some top tips for handling interruptions in the following cases:

--When the interruption comes by phone vs. email vs. in-person

--When the interrupter is a "subordinate" (employee or child) vs. an equal (spouse, vendor) vs. a person with whom you have a complex relationship (client, elderly parent).

--How you can arrange your schedule, your body language, your office furniture and your interpersonal dynamics to eliminate interruptions and limit the impact on your business life.

Until next week…

We now return your to your regularly scheduled Business Consortium messages, already in progress.

--
Julie Bestry, Certified Professional Organizer®
Best Results Organizing
"Don't apologize. Organize!"
organize@juliebestry.com
Visit http://www.juliebestry.com to save time and money, reduce stress and increase your productivity

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