The short version
- Interruptions divide into two piles: questions only you can answer, and questions that have already been answered somewhere.
- Focus time protections fail because they block both piles equally. People learn to interrupt you anyway, because the first pile is real.
- Log a week of interruptions with one extra column: could anyone or anything else have answered this. That column is the whole project.
- The fix is not stronger boundaries. It is making the second pile never arrive.
The standard advice about interruptions is about defence. Block your calendar, set your status, turn off notifications, agree no meeting Wednesdays. All of it helps a little and none of it lasts, because the interruptions have a reason for existing and the defence does not address the reason.
"I set focus time. People messaged me during it, because they needed something and I was the only one who had it."
Why focus time protections fail
A blocked calendar is a blunt instrument. It refuses both the question that genuinely needed you and the question that has been asked four times before, and it refuses them identically.
Your colleagues know that some of their questions are real. So they interrupt anyway, and once the boundary has been crossed for a real reason it gets crossed for unreal ones too, and within three weeks focus time is a note in your calendar that nobody including you believes.
The way out is to stop treating interruptions as one thing.
The one week log
For five working days, note every interruption. Three columns, ten seconds each.
| Column | Why it is there |
|---|---|
| What was asked | So you can spot the repeats, which are always more numerous than you think |
| Could anything else have answered it | The sorting column. Yes means pile two. |
| Was I in deep work | Because the cost of an interruption is not the two minutes, it is the recovery |
Nearly everyone who does this finds the second pile is the large one. Most of what breaks concentration is not judgement. It is where something stands, what was agreed, where a file is, whether a client was told.
Removing the second pile
Pile two splits again, and each half has a different fix.
Static facts. The refund window, the deploy process, which template to use. Write them once, where the question occurs to people rather than in a document tree. A pinned message in the channel beats a wiki page nobody opens, every time. See why nobody reads the docs.
Current state. Where the migration got to, what the client said on Tuesday, whether the invoice went out. This is the larger half and it defeats the documentation approach, because it changes faster than anyone will write it down. So it keeps arriving as a message, and it keeps arriving during your best two hours.
This is what StandIn is built for. At the end of the day you spend about ninety seconds on a brief: what moved, what is open, what is blocked, what is next, mostly drafted from the work that already happened. When you are heads down or offline, your StandIn answers from that brief, in your words, with a source under every answer. It never guesses, and when the answer is not there it says so and names who to ask. The colleague gets their answer in seconds instead of waiting for you, and you never knew they asked. See how it works.
Shaping the first pile
Pile one should reach you. It is your actual value. But it can arrive in a better shape.
- Batch it. One slot a day where you are genuinely available beats being ambiently reachable for eight hours. People will wait two hours for a real answer if they know the slot exists and is reliable.
- Require the options. A question that arrives as "A or B, I think A because X" takes thirty seconds. The same question as "can we chat about the export?" takes twenty minutes.
- Answer in public. Answering in a channel rather than a direct message moves the next identical question into pile two automatically.
The third one compounds quietly and is the cheapest habit on this page.
What makes focus time hold
Focus time survives when it costs your colleagues nothing. If they can get their pile two answer without you, and they know their pile one question will be answered at 15:00, then your blocked morning is not an obstacle to them and they stop working around it.
That is the whole mechanism. Boundaries hold when they are not expensive to respect, and they collapse when they are. See protecting focus time on a shared calendar and what interruptions cost an engineering team.
Common Questions
Should I turn off notifications entirely?
It works for the individual and pushes the cost onto everyone else, who now wait without knowing how long. Pair it with a stated response window, which turns silence into a known quantity. See putting response times in writing.
What about no meeting days?
They protect against meetings and not against messages, which for most people are the larger interruption. Useful, partial. See why no meeting days break.
How do I ask people to stop without sounding difficult?
Do not ask them to stop. Give them somewhere better to go first, then mention it once. A request to stop asking, with no alternative, reads as unhelpfulness and is.
Is it different for managers?
The ratio shifts. More of a manager's interruptions genuinely need them, because decisions are their work. But the second pile still exists, and for managers it is usually about the state of things across the team.
When you're off, your StandIn is on.
It answers your teammates' questions from work you've already done, in your words, with a source under every answer.