"The next day, as soon as I walked in the door, someone asked, “Derek, someone whose CDs"
To me interruptions are the thing I hate the most. What has worked for me in the past is to insist (despite "open door philosophy") that all questions are queued and asked at a single time, as practical. Sure the person asking wants immediate relief, but there is no reason you need to answer questions according to their schedule, unless it is urgent, if they can be combined with other questions they (or others) have.
That's actually one of the benefits of email vs. a telephone call. You can handle it w/o getting interrupted or knocked out of a zone.
I hate interruptions as well, but if you're going to be a manager, I think you have to learn to live with them.
Managers exist to support the managed. Front-line employees are the ones doing the actual work, and I think the actual work should always have the highest priority.
As Derek demonstrates, the way to reduce interruptive employee questions isn't to hide them by driving people away. (If you do that, people will just make shit up or dither, and both are terrible habits.) It's to keep improving things until they don't need to ask.
I've done that to... but you do need to be careful that you're optimising the right thing.
I hate being interrupted - but being interrupted often is often a sign that I'm being the bottleneck in one or more processes. If I force people to queue questions into a single time/place I can end up blocking a whole bunch of peoples work. I might be better off - but the system as a whole slows down... and "urgent" can be a hard thing for people to figure out.
Like the article - I find using interruptions as a sign that there's a process problem that needs fixing to be a excellent strategy.
To me interruptions are the thing I hate the most. What has worked for me in the past is to insist (despite "open door philosophy") that all questions are queued and asked at a single time, as practical. Sure the person asking wants immediate relief, but there is no reason you need to answer questions according to their schedule, unless it is urgent, if they can be combined with other questions they (or others) have.
That's actually one of the benefits of email vs. a telephone call. You can handle it w/o getting interrupted or knocked out of a zone.