Section 2.3. Interruptions

2.3. Interruptions

Interruptions are unavoidable. They are a natural part of the business flow. It is up to us to manage them well.

Being interrupt driven means doing tasks as they arrive as opposed to doing tasks based on some business-driven priority scheme. Sure, many times our business directive is to do interruptions as they arrive, but as you advance in your career, I assure you that this will be less and less so. Think about the organizational structure at a retail store. The clerk working the counter is interrupt driven: a customer comes to the counter, the clerk takes his order, makes change, answers questions, and so on. The clerk's boss, on the other hand, has a schedule of things that must be done: she opens the store, orders products, schedules staff, and so on. Yes, the manager stops for interruptions (questions from staff, emergencies, etc.), but that's a fraction of her job.

When we are interrupt driven, we're letting our interrupters manage our time. We're handing control of our workflow to someone else. Now, I'm all in favor of being customer focused, but only you know what your priorities are. If you control when you do tasks, you can intelligently group and prioritize them in ways that save time. For example, you can collect all the tasks in a particular part of the building and do them in a cluster. This reduces the amount of time spent walking up and down between floors. Chapter 8 shows how doing tasks in the order they are requested can be non-optimal and suggests a number of prioritization strategies that will save you time.

Of course, the fastest way to deal with an interruption is to scream, "Get out of my face!" at the requester and slam the door. However, I can't recommend this technique unless you want to get fired. I have met SAs who recommend being gruff, "scary," or even a "bastard operator from hell" to deter customer requests. I think SAs can do better than to follow this advice.