4.28 How to manage when your work is interrupted all the time

Lots of people struggle to get work done because they feel like they’re always interrupted, whether that’s by colleagues, friends or family. In this episode I discuss how we can explore this with curiosity, and give some tangible tips about how to reduce the likelihood of interruptions as well as reducing the impact on your work. There’s some hard truths in here too, so be ready to get called out (in a loving and compassionate way as usual!)  

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on how to spot, and stop, all or nothing thinking.

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast, and this week we are thinking about interruptions. So this is something members talk about all the time, the fact that they're kind of getting into their work, they finally feel focused. And then they get interrupted. And for some of you it's gonna be things like you're working from home and you are interrupted by your housemates, your family, your kids, others of you, you'll be working in the actual like work environment and you'll be interrupted by students perhaps, or you'll be interrupted by colleagues, sometimes colleagues just wanting to chat, sometimes asking your advice, something urgent needs doing all these different things.

Now, I have to confess with you that when I was still working in the office in my old academic job, I was probably the source of least as many interruptions as I was the victim. I used to get bored of what I was doing and wander the corridors looking for somebody who might be [00:01:00] distractible knocking on people's doors. And so part of this might be about me advising you on how to manage people who do what I used to do.

So partly because of that history, but also just 'cause we're all about compassion around here, we are gonna try and come at this from the point of view that the interrupter isn't necessarily doing anything wrong and is almost certainly not trying to disturb you and interrupt you and jeopardize your work in some way. And we're gonna come at it from the perspective that you are not just problematically distractible. Now, some of you might feel problematically distractible. There are definitely days where I'm problematically distractible, but we're gonna come at it from the point of view that this is just a kind of logistic challenge.

There are people who want to do the thing that interrupt us and we want to do the thing that we had intended to do. We'll say sometimes [00:02:00] secretly like being interrupted, but we'll come back to that in a second. Um, and we'll try and look at it rather than in a kind of goodies and baddies kind of way, look at it as a little challenge not to solve, but a little challenge to minimize the impact of, and I have six suggestions for you today of things you can do to either minimize the interruptions themselves or to minimize the impact that those interruptions have on what you were trying to do. So let's go.

So the first one is that rather than just moan about interactions, we are going to analyze them. I want you to grab a piece of paper and a pen if you can, or do this in your brain if not, have a think about the last few times that you were interrupted, and I want you to describe that context yourself as much as possible.

Where were you? Who interrupted you? [00:03:00] Why did they interrupt you on face value? Why? And then also, why did they really interrupt you? Is there other reasons that they interrupted you? You know, what did they interrupt you about? Were they like me just coming for a chat? Were they seeking help? Did they not know how to do something? What was their reason for interrupting you? And I want you to analyze what happened when you were interrupted. So how did you initially respond? How did you respond as the kind of interruption went on? And then how did that transition back to work go if indeed you did transition back to work? Sometimes we don't. Okay. So I want you to really think through and I want you to come up with three to five examples of recent times when you were interrupted and be able to describe all of what went on. The reason this is so important is when we conceptualize this as a [00:04:00] general, I keep getting interrupted problem. It's really hard to fix because that's very generic. It doesn't really have any insights as to what's going on. And that makes it very hard to figure out our next steps forward. Whereas if we can really dig into it, ask ourselves curious questions about exactly what happens when we get interrupted, then we're much better able to start spotting patterns. And once we start spotting patterns, we can action plan.

So as an example. Why are you getting interrupted? So if you are finding, as one of my members did, so I originally did a version of this as a voice note for one of my members. She noticed that people were asking her for help in the lab. So she's part-time lab work, part-time PhD, and often she would be interrupted for technical support. And so it wasn't just a generic interruptions, it wasn't a mixture of different reasons. It was mostly help [00:05:00] in the laboratory, and that means by narrowing it down like that, we were much better able to then decide ways forward.

And I'm gonna talk, the other five things are gonna be potential ways forward that you could consider using. So I'm not gonna go through those now, but it's gonna be much easier to choose which ones are right for you, if you are more aware of who you get interrupted by, when you get interrupted, and for what reasons.

So the second thing, and this is the first of the, what you can actually do about it things is really thinking about intentional time blocks. Now in the , at the moment, I'm teaching my role-based time blocking system, and this is really about choosing intentionally when you're in what mode in your life.

Now this can help us in a couple of different ways with interruptions. The first and the one that people always think about is trying to identify what times of day you are really, really not interruptable and why. So just [00:06:00] as if you were in a meeting with somebody, really important, people wouldn't just come bursting in unless it was an emergency. We wanna think about how much of your day, or what is a short block of your day that you could set aside as being uninterruptible. And we'll talk in a second about how you manage the people around you and whether they respect that or not. But the first step is you identifying it because if you always intend to be uninterruptible and you always are interruptible, then that's where things are starting to go wrong because we are planning as though we won't be interrupted and then we're always allowing ourselves to be interrupted. And so it's very, very hard to follow our intentional plans. And then we get to the end of the day, end of the week, wondering why we didn't do all the things that we said we would.

So I want there to be some differentiation in your time blocks where some of the time blocks are absolute do not disturb me [00:07:00] unless someone's bleeding type time blocks. Or others are, I've got stuff to do, but I'm interruptible. And we'll think more about how we can request stuff from other people. We can think more about other ways to make these easier to adhere to. But it starts from having that actual intention. We can't adhere to things, We can't make other people adhere to things if we're not actually clear about what it is.

So one of the things I see, particularly with people who have responsibility for others. So say you are somebody who can give advice in the laboratory, or somebody who has students or any of these things. Often the reason we get interrupted is because there isn't any intentional time in which you can be contacted. In fact, one of the things my members end up doing is knocking on their supervisor's doors or grabbing them when they see them in the department because they can't get email answers from their supervisors because there isn't a [00:08:00] specific time where it's okay to interrupt that person and so the only way to get their time and attention is to interrupt them.

So I want you to check in with yourself. Is there actually designated time where the people that need you can see? You can ask these things. Similarly, those of you who work at home, if you have other family members or other flatmates at home, do you differentiate between times that you don't want to be interrupted and times where you could be interrupted and times where actually you are there for them?

Because if people feel like it's all kind of, you are off limits, but they need something, they're gonna come whenever they need it. Whereas if they know that they need something and that their time with you is at 12 or whatever, then it's much easier to go. Yeah, yeah, I'll ask her about that then 'cause then she'll have brain space. So we wanna be as intentional as possible. Not expecting this gold standard of never being [00:09:00] interrupted because that's never gonna happen. But having that gradation of how okay it is to interrupt you at any one time so that at least you know what the plan is, even if others don't necessarily stick to it.

What we can then do, if we know that, is we can then decide which things we do in which time blocks. So you can then allocate types of jobs to your uninterruptible slots and different types of jobs to your interruptible slots. So maybe stuff where you have to really immerse yourself in it, where having to come up to answer a question would really throw you off. We do those in our uninterruptible blocks. But then we do other stuff where we're, you know, we could dip in and out a little bit. We do that during our more interruptable blocks and then during the blocks where we're actually like intended to be interrupted. We are not allocating other things to that time. Because many [00:10:00] of you will sort of go into your place of work a couple of times a week, let's say. And if you plan your days when you are in work to be productive on your own stuff for eight hours and then go home again, we are setting ourselves up for fail because people are gonna see you.

People are gonna wanna say hi, people are gonna wanna ask you a question. They go, oh, while you're here, could I just, all those things. We need to plan our days where it actually allows time for that to happen. 

The next thing you can do with third tip to help you sort of reinforce that is think about how you can modify your environment in order to make that clearer. So this can be down to if my door's shut, please don't knock. If my door's open, you can come on in. Those sorts of things. It can be going somewhere else so that it's physically harder to interrupt you, during those periods where you are interrupt It could be physically going somewhere different during those periods where you want to be interruptable so that you are [00:11:00] away from the laboratory. You are away so the students don't know where you are, where your colleagues don't know where you are. I used to have various places I hid on my old university campus. So that sort of geographic, boundaries can just make it a little bit easier. We then do also have to reinforce our own tendencies to distract ourselves and interrupt ourselves by also going, you know what, and I'm gonna turn the wifi off, or, and I'm gonna block my emails for a while, or whatever it might be.

Now some of you might be saying, oh, I wish I had an office with a door. I'm in a shared office. But even in those things, you can think about what are environmental signals that you can use. Now, we've all seen probably on like Instagram or whatever these videos of people who've got a sign on their back of the chair saying, please don't interrupt me. I mean, that's a pretty extreme version, but you can even do that. But even things like, if you've got your headphones on, please don't talk to me. That's a signal that I'm focusing, for example. Okay, so thinking about how can you make it [00:12:00] clearer to other people? How can you make it more differentiated for yourself so that it's less likely that you'll get the interruptions and that it's easier to stick to what you intentionally said you would do?

 Now building on that, the fourth thing is that this involves other people, right? And other people always make things more complicated. And you hear people throw around the word boundaries. You need to have boundaries. Have boundaries, and people throw them around without really defining what they mean by boundaries.

And I'm not gonna pretend to give you some like universal definition of boundaries, but I'm gonna tell you what I mean when I talk about boundaries and how I differentiate it from what I call requests. And this is because I'm afraid to tell you, and it annoys me too, but other people won't necessarily do what we ask them to do, and that is the human right.

Oh, fabulous. But seriously, it is the truth, right? We can ask people not to do things, and that's what I call a request. We can say to somebody, please could you not [00:13:00] interrupt me between eight and 10:00 AM. Or please, could you not interrupt me when my office door shut unless X, Y, and Z has happened? Please, could you not interrupt me when I got my headphones on? These sorts of things, these are requests. These are not boundaries. These are requests, and we get to look inwards and say to ourselves, do I think this is a reasonable request? Now, if we are saying to our 4-year-old, please do not interrupt Mommy, who's the only adult in the house for eight hours. Probably not reasonable. We're not gonna do that. If we're asking our PhD students not to come and ask us a question before 10:00 AM because we're working on our own work, probably reasonable in our minds, okay? Whether they agree or not another matter. But we get to look inwards and we get to say, do I think that this is a reasonable request? Does making this request help me show up as the person that I want to be? Is this in line with my values and things?

And then we also ask ourselves, is this something [00:14:00] that the person is capable of adhering to? So same as with a 4-year-old, right? They're not capable of understanding, it's not something they're gonna stick to. But thinking is the person we're requesting this of actually capable of doing the thing we're asking. So if you've got somebody new working in your laboratory, or you've got a student who's just started, who doesn't know what they're doing or whatever. Is it reasonable? Are they capable of waiting till Tuesdays to ask you questions? Maybe not. They might need more than that, right? So we get to ask, is this in line with my values? Is this something that they are likely to be capable of? And if the answer to both of those things are yes, then we get to make our request. Requests always go best, where we make it clear that it's just a request, it's not an order or any of those things, but where we also explain how it would help us and we explain how we are mitigating the impact on them. So we are not only asking them not to do it, we're also making it clear when they [00:15:00] can ask for things and why this will help them as well as us and all that. We then, and this is the bit I struggle with, this is the bit everybody struggles with unfortunately, we then have to allow them and their grown up human brains to decide whether they're going to adhere to this or not. Now, if you are parenting, it's slightly different because we get a level of leeway of telling people how they can behave when we're parenting. But in any other situation with your students and your colleagues and all those things, if they're grown ass adults, they can do what they like regardless of what we've requested but we get to make our request in a way we feel is appropriate and hope that they adhere to it.

What boundaries are? Boundaries are about what you do. So what do you do if somebody doesn't adhere to your request? If somebody behaves in a way that's not how you've asked 'em to behave, so they, let's say they come to you and interrupt you during a time period where you've asked them not to. The boundaries are around how you respond. And again, you get to [00:16:00] decide, right? You get to decide what boundaries you have and how strictly you adhere to them. But the important thing is not about they shouldn't ask. The thing with a boundary is what are you gonna do if they do?

So, as an example, you might set a boundary that if somebody interrupts me between 8:00 AM and 10:00 AM I'm gonna ask them to come back at 10. And if then you think, well, what if they say No? No, it'll only take a minute. It'll only take a minute. You then decide what is your boundary Then is just a minute okay. Or do you want to reinforce? No. Unless somebody needs an ambulance, please come back at 10 o'clock. I know it will be easier for you to interrupt me right now. I know it might hold you up. You're gonna need to do other things, but this is my boundary. Come back at 10 o'clock. Okay. You get to decide where that boundary is.

Now for some of you, you might say, oh, well they've interrupted me now. I might as well help them 'cause my brain's already out of my work. But we have to think about this. Not in a patronizing way, but we have to [00:17:00] think about this a little bit like parenting. 'cause if you ask them not to interrupt you, but when they interrupt you, you help them. Why would they not? Why would they not interrupt you? If you go for the, oh, well, you've interrupted me now, I might as well help that in no way encourages them to solve their own problems. It in no way encourages them not to interrupt you in future. In fact, it reinforces why you are interruptable, so you get to decide where those boundaries sit.

Now just to be clear, that doesn't have to be an absolute, I will not boundary. It could be, for example, that if somebody knocks on your door during a time when you've asked not to be interrupted, you will not say, come in, you will walk to your door. Open your door if you want to have a conversation to quickly answer a question on the doorstep, as it were, you can, and then you shut the door and you go back to your desk.

We used to have a thing when I was an academic and I tended to be one of the people that students like came to if they had issues and things like [00:18:00] that. We used to have a thing that if, if you were in the middle of something, unless they were crying, don't let them sit down. Because once somebody sat down in your office, way harder to get rid of them, way harder to get back to work. So it was always stand at the door, don't let them sit down. They can't settle in. If they've sat down, they've settled in. So it doesn't have to be an absolute, I will just ignore you or not answer your question, but it can be other boundaries around how kind of settled you will allow them to get.

So that's the difference between requests and boundaries. I want you to be really, really clear at any time which you're working with. Have a think now about what requests you might want to make of the people around you. See if you can identify one thing that you would like to request of one person. Think about how it fits your values. Think about why it might be achievable for them, how it might even be useful for them, and think about how you feel about having that conversation. Also have a think what's one boundary you might wanna put in place, perhaps related to that [00:19:00] request as a kind of, if that request isn't followed, then I will do this. Have an idea of what that might be.

The fifth thing I want you to think about is being really cautious of all or nothing thinking. Now we talk about all or nothing thinking quite a bit. In fact, I'm gonna refer to you in the show notes 'cause I did a whole episode about all or nothing thinking and I don't think I've referred to it recently and it's one you might not have found. So I'm gonna make sure I link that in for you in the show notes. By the way, the show notes were always on my website, but if you're like, I'll never go and look at that, babe. Uh, make sure you're on my newsletter. If you're not on my newsletter already, why not? Uh, go to the PhD life coach.com. You'll see a sign up for the newsletter button right on the front page there. You'll get an email from me once a week where I tell you what's going on in the podcast. Um, I'll give you a summary of the podcast and some reflective questions and an action to take and things like that. And the link to related episodes. So it's a really good way to make sure that you're not just listening to the podcast and then forgetting it ever exists, but instead you're kind of taking the stuff that we talk about and applying it [00:20:00] into your life. If you are struggling, if you've been here a little minute and you've been on the newsletter, and you're trying to apply stuff in your life, but you still find yourself not able to do it, that usually means you need a bit more support.

The PhD Life Coach membership does exactly that for PhD students, and we do allow early postdocs to sneak in so be aware. But that's exactly what I do. I in that is a more structured support if you struggle to apply things for yourself or if you just prefer to learn and develop in community. We open again at the end of April, so in about eight weeks. So if you're on the newsletter, you'll be the first to hear about it all. Make sure you keep an ear out. We do have free workshops in between. We just did the February one, March one is 25th, I'm gonna say of March dates on my website, you can double check and that's about smashing your to-do list.

So do make sure that you check that out and sign up if you are interested. Anyway, all or nothing thinking. That's what I [00:21:00] was talking about. So I think there's two different ways that all or nothing thinking show up here. I haven't explained what all or nothing thinking is. Should we do that first? We'll do that first. All or nothing thinking is where we have kind of extremes of expectations. You know, I must exercise four times a week or it's not worth it. That's all or nothing thinking.

Everyone is doing better than me in my PhD. No one else has been overlooked for promotion as many times as me. These sorts of superlative things that see either extreme of a situation without sort of recognizing the nuance, recognizing the options in between. That's the sort of all or nothing thinking that we're thinking about here. And I see this show up with interruptions in two different ways.

The first way is the notion that I can't get on with my work unless I know I won't be interrupted. Often people have very [00:22:00] rigid beliefs about what the ideal working conditions are and a belief that they're the only working conditions. So any of you, and this is usually part-time students or people that are doing their academic work alongside an academic job, for example, say your PhD or other research, this notion that you need, I, I couldn't, unless I've got three or four hours, I can't get started, that's all or nothing thinking, okay, it might have some grounding, you might find it easier with big blocks of time, but that's an example if I, I just couldn't, it is all or nothing thinking. So here, if you find yourself thinking, I can't get started because I might get interrupted and I can't work if I know I might be interrupted.

I want you just to really poke that thought a little bit. When we see these extreme thoughts, it's really useful just to test it a little bit. Is that [00:23:00] actually true? Is there nothing useful I could do? If there's a risk, I'm gonna be interrupted. Is there bits maybe that I could do sometimes before I get interrupted? At least not assuming that I will be interrupted. Really poking at that and working out what? You know, is that really extremely true? And for most of you it won't be. And if it is true, I want you to ask yourself why is that true? Because usually if that actually is true, that if you think there's any possibility of getting interrupted, you can't start. I'm going to very lovingly and gently suggest that that's a you problem rather than a them problem. Usually that's something about us getting our emotions up, getting frustration and things like that up at the thought [00:24:00] that they are stopping us working, they shouldn't interrupt us. It's because of them, I can't do this. If you've heard me talk about the drama triangle, it's getting into that kind of villain blamey mode. This is, I'm the victim. You are the villain. You keep interrupting me. It's because of you that I can't work. The problem there is not the interruptions, the problem's, this belief that it's other people that are impacting your ability to do things and that you have no control over that.

Some of it is low self-efficacy around your ability to manage interruptions. So it's not so much that you are angry at other people interrupting, it's that you don't trust that you are able to get yourself on track. You don't trust that you're able to say no and move them away from you, prevent them from interrupting you or minimize that interruption. If that's the case, it's okay. Right? All of these things, it's okay. It's just useful to know because then [00:25:00] again, the problem is not them interrupting you. The problem is that you don't have a strategy to deal with it, and today I am teaching you some strategies. So you do. So we have all or nothing thinking about whether we can even work when we might get interrupted.

The other place that I see a lot of all or nothing thinking is around this idea that if I get interrupted, that's my work block over. Ugh, you've interrupted me now. That sort of vibe, and so off you go. And again, let's poke that. Is that really true? Is it true that because somebody has come in, you now can't use the rest of the session?

Is it true that because that person has asked for five minutes, that you have to give them five minutes? Is it true that if you give them five minutes, you might as well sack off the rest of your workout? This is like saying, I don't have time to go to the gym for an hour, so I won't go. Rather than seeing, actually, I could get something useful done in 30 minutes, for example.

So double check. If you're telling yourself, Ugh, I've been [00:26:00] interrupted. Now, I might as well just go and help double check that and double check that assumption, because actually with some of these boundaries, with some of these requests, with some of these techniques that I'm teaching you. It may well be possible.

It should be possible for you to be interrupted, manage it, manage our own thoughts and emotions about it, and nudge ourselves back to our task again. So that when we get interrupted, it doesn't have to necessarily mean that we can't continue to work.

And that leads me to my sixth one and this one. I have to be careful how I explain it. 'Cause sometimes people interpret it wrong. I am gonna tell you what it is and then I'll tell you how people misinterpret it. The sixth one is that sometimes I think people like getting interrupted. I know. I know. Especially the people that moan about getting interrupted. I'm really sorry if I'm calling you out, [00:27:00] but the thing with interruptions is often interruptions are a really good excuse to stop doing something that felt difficult or boring, or that you felt guilty 'cause you hadn't done before, or that you just didn't feel very motivated by. You felt bored by, or whatever. They were really good reason to go away.

I want you to imagine that you are at an event that you've paid lots of money for. You've been looking forward to ages, you know, whatever your equivalent of the Taylor Swift Eras tour was, you are there and somebody says, oh, can I just pick your brain about this piece of lab equipment or whatever.

You are either gonna not answer your phone or you are gonna give them the shortest. Yep, yep, yep. Okay. Yep. No worries. Thanks. Bye. And get back to the concert. ASAP. It's gonna be very unusual circumstances in [00:28:00] which you will actually go, oh, well I've been interrupted now. No point going back. Yeah, and translate Taylor Swift might not be your vibe. I don't know. Choose your vibe. So sometimes the problem is not so much that we're getting interrupted, the problem is that you kind of like it. Because we can blame somebody else for why we're not doing the thing.

It's not our fault. We were interrupted and we can go and do a thing. And I talk about this in my eight ways, you're secretly procrastinating episode that I often mention. Helping somebody else is way easier 'cause you get credit for it, you get some social interaction. They're very grateful. You feel like a good person. It's usually pretty clearly defined. It's usually easier. You haven't got a big emotional baggage about it. Way easier to go and do that than do the thing that you intended to be doing. If you're trying to do complex analysis or write something or whatever, way easier to go and do the interruption.

So just be really careful and I'm calling you out as usual, with [00:29:00] love and compassion. I do this too. Okay? If you realize, oh gosh, that is me. Yeah, I do do that. This is not a sign that you are like. Fundamentally flawed or anything like that. It's just really useful to notice.

Sometimes we tell ourselves that, you know, good people are helpful, good people are willing to go and do help other people. And so, and it's true, right? We like people, we wanna be collaborative, we wanna make time to help other people. But it can't be the time that you've put aside to do your specific stuff because at some point you won't be helpful anymore 'cause you won't have enough of your own expertise.

If you don't put aside time to develop and hone and further extend your expertise, you will become less and less helpful over time. Helping other people all the time is not the route to being the best person to being the most helpful person. Part of helping other people is [00:30:00] having your own expertise so that you're actually useful and we have to allow time for that.

So if you are somebody who really values being collaborative, helping other people being, you know, engaged in other people's work and stuff, great time block it. Time block time for that. Allow it to happen when you are doing less cognitively demanding work for sure, but you need to have time for your own expertise development in order to be helpful, and that's even aside from you. You just deserve to have that time for yourself, I believe. But some people don't believe that necessarily, but even if you think your top, top priority is helping other people, developing your own expertise is part of that. Protecting your time to progress your work is the best way of doing that.

You wanna help more people, get big grants in, employ other people, support other students. Develop a reputation, so they want to come and work with you, build collaborations by [00:31:00] producing high quality work. All of the collaborative things, all of the helpful things need you to actually do your own work too. There is nothing selfish about making the time to do your own work.

 So if you've been listening to this part going, oh yeah, I think I do that. Yeah. I think I allow myself to be interrupted because it's easier. That's okay. Let's just notice. We notice, we do the things that I've said so far, so we notice what we're interrupted by and why we think if there are ways that we can prevent it. So if there's things that you are routinely asked about, how can you make it clearer how to do them. If somebody always asks you about a particular lab technique, make [00:32:00] a standard operating procedure. Put labels on the thing, showing where things go, if you're always asked where something goes, see how you can make it easier for other people to not have to interrupt you. Intentionally time block so that you know when are your kind of non-negotiable, non interruptable times. When are your, you could interrupt me, but I am doing things time and when is your No, no come find me 'cause I'm literally here for you times, differentiate those out. Try really intentionally to stick to them. Use environmental reinforcements. Consider going somewhere else, changing your environment in some sort of visible way so that people understand what context you are in.

Think about who you need to make those requests of what requests you might make. Check in that they feel good to you regardless of how they respond. Think about what boundaries you want to put in place. Notice where you are using all or nothing thinking and just poke it a little bit. See if there's ways that it's not quite true. See if there's ways that you could work, even though [00:33:00] you might get interrupted. See if there's ways that you believe that if you are interrupted, you could get back to work and then double check whether this is kind of a bit of procrastination.

Are you being interrupted because it's easier than doing the thing that you're intended to do. And I'm actually gonna throw in a bonus seventh one, which is practice restarting.

Practice restarting after an interruption. So in when I teach about procrastination, I use the analogy of a tightrope walker that beginner tight ropers wobble a lot and they don't notice their wobbling until they've really wobbled, and then they tend to either overcorrect or correct too late. And so they wobble and fall off and most beginner tight ropers. Think that tight ropers don't wobble. Tight ropers do wobble. They're just really good at noticing a tiny wobble and proportionately responding [00:34:00] to it to correct themselves back. So they absolutely do wobble. Just in a much more sort of nuanced and subtle way 'cause they're better at spotting when it happens and they're better at nudging themselves back to balance. And when I talk about procrastination, that's the example that I use, that people who are big procrastinators don't notice their procrastinating for ages, and then they either massively overcorrect or don't correct at all.

They just go, oh, I've wasted time now that sucks. Try again tomorrow. Whereas people who can stay focused, it's not that they're just focused all the time, it's that they quickly notice they've lost focus. They quickly and un dramatically bring themselves back to focus. And so like a tight roper to all extents and purposes, it doesn't look like they lost focus, but they did. They did. They're human beings. We all lose focus.

And the same is true with interruptions. If you can practice not being massively wppd [00:35:00] when you have an interruption that we keep it to a minimum, we deal with it. We get either ask them to come back another time, deal with it quickly, deal with a little bit of it, and ask 'em to come back another time to deal with the rest or whatever it might be, and that we then nudge ourselves back to balance, nudge ourselves back to working again as quickly as possible so that rather than sitting there going, oh, I've been interrupted now, I might as well go and help or I've been interrupted. Now they've ruined it. There's no point trying to get back into it. I never could. I'm just gonna do my emails. We get to go. Okay, I got interrupted. Back to this, where was I? Except it's gonna take a little minute to pull yourself back in and work out where you were and carry on.

But practice that coming back because just as tightrope walkers develop over time to wobble less, you can develop over time, then an interruption doesn't not knock you as far or for as long and get better at pulling yourself back to exactly where you were. All of these things are about developing the skills to [00:36:00] navigate these situations, to developing the self-efficacy to believe that we can at least learn how to do that, even if you don't believe you can manage it at the moment, believing that we can learn how to do these things and then practicing doing it just as we're tight rope walking. We have to practice. We have to expect we won't be perfect at first. We have to accept that we will fall, we will get interrupted, we'll wander off. It's all good. We bring ourselves back. We practice, and over time we develop our skills to manage interruptions. I really hope that is useful for you all today. Thank you all so much for listening, and I will see you next week.