25 The Put Through List

Your day doesn’t fall apart because you have “too much to do.” It falls apart because everyone else gets a vote on what you do next. Today, we tackle a practical time management problem most professionals quietly accept: constant interruptions that break focus, trigger reactive decision making, and turn the workday into firefighting.

We share a simple system we call the put-through list, a short, intentional list of people and organizations who can interrupt you immediately. Everyone else follows a clear process for handling. We talk through how to keep the list small, how to define what’s truly urgent, and how to train your team so the system is consistent and respectful.

From there, we zoom out into the productivity habits that make this work long term: batching callbacks at set times, setting expectations through voicemail when you don’t have staff, and using delegation to solve problems before they escalate to you. You don’t need to be instantly available to be reliable. With the right filters, you can stay accessible, responsive, and effective while protecting deep work and getting control of your schedule back.

If this helped, subscribe for more practical productivity systems, share the episode with someone whose phone never stops ringing, and leave a review so more people can find it.

Blinn Bates - BlinnBates.com

Woods & Bates, P.C. - WoodsandBates.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back. Last episode we talked about interruptions, how those interruptions can destroy your day. Today I want to build on that. I want to give you a practical system to control some of those interruptions without becoming totally unavailable or unresponsive to everyone. So we don't need fewer people contacting us. We need better filters for when people do contact us. In most businesses, in my experience, everything is treated like it's urgent. Every call,

Why Everything Feels Urgent

SPEAKER_00 0:30

every question, every issue gets immediate access and attention. And the result of this is constant interruptions, broken focus, reactive decision-making, firefighting type days. The truth is very few things are truly urgent, and most things can wait to the end of the day or the next day, whatever the case may be. It doesn't need to be addressed immediately most of the time. If everything we have is urgent, then nothing is important because everything gets the same priority. So in the last episode, we talked about interruptions, how to log those, seeing patterns in those, and seeing where they come from. And I can say with relative certainty that telephone calls, people stopping in, things like that are pretty predictable sources of interruption most of the time. So instead of reacting to those, we're going to develop a system to manage them when they come up. And this is something that I call the put-through list. So what's a put-through list? This is a list of people or organizations who you are allowed to be interrupted for immediately. If they call, if they come by, they get through. If they're not on the list, then it makes it very simple. Calls handled, scheduled later for a callback. Maybe somebody else can help. But there's processes in place if the person is not on that put-through list. Who can go on this list? This can

The Put-Through List Explained

SPEAKER_00 1:56

be, this is a personal list, so it could be key members on your team at work. It could be family members, spouse, children, parents. Maybe you have some critical clients, some big clients that when they call, you answer the telephone. Maybe there's opposing counsel that you want to get through right away so you don't have to play phone tag, decision makers, things like that. These are the people that go on our list. This is not going to be everyone. And this isn't convenience based. This isn't firefighting. You know, I don't want every phone call, every person that stops in to be put through to me. This is in case these people come in, they're the ones that you can interrupt me for. So if I have my door shut and I'm working on something, you know that I'm not supposed to be interrupted. So-and-so calls, you can buzz me for that. Access needs to be earned by priority, not necessarily availability. So this works because it reduces a lot of unnecessary interruptions. It protects your time for things like deep work and doing the work that you know you need to do. And it creates clarity for your team members to know, okay, this is somebody that I need to put through to them right away. This is this is somebody that's not on that list. So I need to take care of that in a different fashion. So it ensures that your priorities still reach you in some way, but maybe not right away. So how do we how do we implement this? Well, we've got to create the list. So we're gonna write down maybe five to ten people or entities. So maybe it's my children's school, maybe it's my spouse, maybe I want the my doctor to get through right away. Again, this is personal, so but we want to keep the list small. We want to train our people to clearly communicate to them who gets through, who's on this list, who's not on

Build The List And Rules

SPEAKER_00 3:50

this list, and what to do if they're not on the list. So what qualifies as urgent and what doesn't. If I'm sitting in my office and the building's on fire, I would hope that somebody would interrupt me, you know. But if somebody stops in and off the street, they want to talk to an attorney, that doesn't rise to the level of interruption. So that gets handled in a different way. We could take a message, route it to somebody else that can deal with it, schedule a callback, whatever we're gonna do. Scheduling a callback, I think, works really well. So we could say this individual is occupied at the moment. They typically return phone calls at 3:30. Could I put you down for him to call you back at that time? And then that eliminates some of the back and forth with the phone tag that personally drives me insane. So you just have to communicate this, set the expectation for here's what's gonna happen. If you don't have staff, you could do this by voicemail, even. You know, you could change your

Callbacks That Kill Phone Tag

SPEAKER_00 4:48

voicemail to say, I'm not available right now. I typically return calls at 3:30 and nine o'clock, whatever the case is. And then it will set the expectation for the person that's called you that you're gonna do that. So you have to follow through with that, or else they're not gonna respect it either. This kind of structure creates respect for your time and for theirs because they know what to expect, when maybe to expect that phone call back. And most of the time, that's fine. That's all they need. They need that call back, but it doesn't have to be right then. So instead of reacting all day, we're batching again. Maybe we have all those callbacks at the same time. So that's the same type of work that we're putting that all together, and we're doing that at set intervals that are on our timetable, not necessarily everyone else's. That's the same deal with email. You know, we're putting this back on our timetable and staying in control of how we want to handle our days to avoid these constant interruptions, but still remain responsive. I think that's a really, really important point. We still want to be responsive. We still want to be returning phone calls in some way, shape, or form or getting back to people, responding to that email, whatever we need to do, but also doing it in a way that works for us. We don't need to be instantly available to be reliable. We can still be responsive and not be instantly available. Now, to take this a step further, we've talked about delegation, we've talked about training up other people to solve problems before they escalate to you. That would be even better. Very few problems I've found actually need to be solved by me in the moment. And there's several other people usually that can solve those problems if they know what the problem is that needs to be solved. So maybe they can inquire, is there something I could help you with? And a lot of times, maybe that's oh, I needed this document

Delegate Before Problems Escalate

SPEAKER_00 6:39

sent to me. Sure, I can do that right now, no problem. Maybe they have a question that that individual can answer for them. So maybe they want to come in and sit down and talk. Well, that's an easy fix, too. We can schedule an appointment for that, and then we all know when that's gonna happen. Now that's done, it hasn't been escalated to you at all, and you haven't been involved until you actually need to be, if you actually need to be. So, common objection to this is I'm gonna miss something. I'm gonna miss something important. I would I would tell you that in my experience, this put-through list is gonna protect against that. Because if you know ahead of time something is truly important and you want that to be dealt with immediately, that person's gonna be on the list. Now, true emergencies happen. Again, I think those are rare. Most quote unquote urgent issues can wait an hour, two, five, maybe even

Missing Something And True Emergencies

SPEAKER_00 7:32

twelve a day, whatever. Our rule of thumb is we like to get back to people within 24 hours. And I think that's very possible. What this does is it just requires you to think through this ahead of time before you're reacting, before you're in firefighting mode. And the good news with this is it's revocable, and you can change it anytime. You can take people off the list, you can put people on the list. I think you'll find, and this is what's happened in my experience, that your list is gonna shrink over time. When you're first starting out, that list might be a little bit larger once you've been at whatever you're doing for five, 10, 20 years. I think that list is gonna shrink pretty drastically. Your people are gonna be trained to know this is the way this works. You know, of course I expect he's gonna call me back at 4 30 this afternoon. That's what he's done for the last two decades. He's gonna call me. I expect it, and I'll be waiting. So being constantly available is not our goal. We want to be effective. We want to be responsive, but we want to be effective by doing it. So this week, I challenge you to sit down, take 15, 20 minutes, and create your put-through list. Then take the next step, train your staff, train your team on how to use it, set a couple times per day to return calls and see how much more control this gives you over your day. I think you're really going to like it. These interruptions don't have to control your schedule, but we do have to plan for them. We have to be intentional about it. And with the right systems, we can still stay accessible, we can stay responsive, we can stay effective, but

Challenge And Closing Principles

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we can also keep our focus when we need it. That's where our predictivity is going to live. So protect your time, control your access. That's how you're going to maximize your time and elevate your life.