I need to stick to what I planned to do yesterday, by handling today’s interruptions in a time box. In the glory of yesterday, I was blissfully free from all of the minor emergencies that came up today.

Managers need to stay on top of things to keep their team pointed in the right direction.  Engineers need to get to the bottom of things. These roles require different structuring of time, and an “in the trenches manager” risks letting the manager-piece take over if unchecked. You need uninterrupted blocks of time in order to be technically productive.  Ramp up has a significant cost to your efficiency for detailed work where you need to be in flow.    

Email has made this much worse than it used to be: 

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”–Don Knuth, author and computer science professor 

My process has evolved into only checking email twice a day. It may seem like I’m expressing my highly egomaniacal nature by putting other people off. In reality I’m super susceptible to positive and negative social pressure. I use it to push myself towards doing things intentionally. Like all humans, I tend to believe I can help “other people” and that I am needed–and this gets me into trouble. I need to avoid social pressure that distracts me from my goals. 

I use a gmail plugin, boomerang, to schedule when email comes into my inbox. Since email is all about the agenda of “other people” and typically represents their requests of my time, this small friction to seeing all the latest requests from “other people” helps keep me from getting distracted. Sometimes I need information from those “other people” to work on yesterday’s plan for today, or I have ongoing scheduling negotiations to manage. In those cases I look at the “all mail” folder in gmail for my specific “other person” and remind myself that these emails will come in and get processed in due turn when the scheduler sends them to my inbox.

In order to stick with yesterday’s agenda, I also have a timer. I will set it for two or five minutes as I go through email to ensure that I give up at the first hint of an obstacle.

There is a saying that “time heals all wounds”. This is untrue of course: occasionally people get maimed when the wound is too deep to heal. But one thing that time does heal is the false urgency generated by “other people” and my own internal gremlins of procrastinating curiosity. I’ve been amazed at how many things resolve themselves if left to simmer for half a day to a day.  To my surprise and delight other people can often solve their own problems without me.

Are there exceptions to this paradigm?  Of course.  As a manager you can probably leave “other people” to their own devices for two, four, or eight hours so you can have chunks of flow time.  But when people in your group come to you with their hair on fire, you need to help put it out.  We often skip the second part of the fire fighting process.  We don’t evaluate why there was a fire, or pattern of fires, in the first place.  If you feel you are continually fighting fires and can’t figure out the patterns of why, you may need to re-evaluate. Are the right people on the team in the right positions?  This includes your position. Are there realistic expectations of your team? It could be that your efforts at managing up are not effective.  Or it could be you are in a no win situation for making expectations and reality converge.