Interruptions and Context
10 articles on interruptions and context.
Sort Your Interruptions Into Two Piles and Only One Should Reach You
Focus time fails because it blocks real questions and repeat questions alike. Log a week, sort them, and make the second pile never arrive.
An Internal FAQ That Stays Current (Most Do Not, Here Is Why)
FAQs go stale because they mix answers that never change with answers that change weekly. Split them, and cap the stable half at twenty entries.
Nobody Reads the Docs. Here Is What They Do Instead.
People message the person who wrote the doc, because asking takes eleven seconds and works. Better search and better structure do not fix it.
Bus Factor of One: the Person Who Can Never Take a Holiday
Bus factor is not a catastrophe risk, it is an annual cost: one holiday, a fortnight of lost momentum. Why documentation misses it and what actually reduces it.
Answering the Same Question for the Fourth Time Is a System Failure
The fourth time you answer something, the problem is not the asker. The answer exists and is not reachable.
Slack Norms a Team Actually Keeps (Template)
Six norms, not twenty: response time, channels over DMs, whole question, threads, scheduled send, and check what they wrote down before you ask.
Protecting Focus Time When Everyone Can See Your Calendar
A focus block is visible to everyone and defended by no one. It stops meetings and not messages. Here is why it fails, and what has to exist behind it.
Reducing Slack Interruptions on a Team of Twelve
On a twelve-person team the channel becomes a support desk with one unpaid operator. Four steps in order, ending with the one that works.
Context Switching: the Cost Is in the Questions, Not the Tickets
Work-in-progress limits fix the switches you planned. The expensive ones are involuntary: someone asks where a thing is and you drop what you were holding.
What Interruptions Cost an Engineering Team, and Where They Come From
The cost of an interruption is the recovery, not the two minutes. Where interruptions come from, and why two people absorb most of them.
Your team’s week, answered from the work.
If this is your team’s week, see what a StandIn does with it.