Dealing With Interuption

Fellas,

Been struggling really hard lately with the issue of interuption. It's really messing with my head to an unhealthy level. Examples:

At work, between the phone and people barging in my office, I bet I get interupted 40x a day between just the phone and people barging in. Mind you I do work that requires focus, skill, and concentration. Even a small task takes focus and I struggle to complete tasks of all sizes. It has got to the point where if I really want to complete a big project at work I have to take a day off and go hide in the corner of the library with my laptop. But even then I'm required to keep my cell on 24x7x365 so they at work just call that. And I get in trouble when I don't answer it. The fact that I took it as a vacation day means nothing.

My phone goes off all day and night. I get these automated alerts from work of things that are down so my sleep is constantly interupted. I am not required to act on each alert, but I am required to at least look at them in the middle of the night to see if I should act on them. ANd if I fail to act on one that I should, I get in trouble at work the next day.


At home I might be working on my budget or fixing the lawn mower or working on a computer for a friend, and it's pretty much the same thing. If I get 20 full minutes without something pulling me away, it's a good day.

As I get older, it gets harder to recover from the interuptions. I will forget what step I was on and what I was doing, and then have to backtrack, thus spending more time on the task than I normally would have if people would have just left me alone.

At work people are even getting to where they will cut in while I am on the phone, they just don't care. Everything new this second is always top priority over anything I was working on this second -1.

My boss has even said "you need to learn to prioritize better". It's hard to prioritize when everything you do is priority #1 and you are guaranteed, if you have 10 tasks, to be pizzing off 9 people because you were not working on theirs at any given second.

Its got to the point where I think I am getting ADD because now I expect interuptions all the time, and have trouble focusing even when people aren't interupting me because I know its only a matter of minutes before they will.

I am about at my wits end. Today I called in sick for work because I have a really nasty soar throat and headache, and work just bothered me for over 1/2 a day, interrupted my rest, they don't care.. Their stupid cr@p is priority over my health.

Sorry if this sounds like a rant, but I'm really at my wits end, and am curious if other people go through these same struggles....

logicallefty....not sure I have any great advice for except what has worked for me in the past. You have to set boundaries and force people to respect them. Put first things first. My job is the same way, I have to sit down and 'grind' but at the same time I have people calling about sh*t all day, and it's never easy sh*t, always hard questions that require some research or thought. I usually don't answer emails or calls at night or on weekends unless I'm completely free.

I always remember back to when I didn't have a company cell phone, and then when I did, for a while I didn't have email on my phone. At that point, people are literally FORCED to wait on you even if they need something immediately. Funny enough, I never got stressed out, I just did what I had to do, when I needed to do it.

PairPlusRoyalFlush said:

I'm the same way...not sure what the solution is. I am definitely prone to distraction by electronics, mainly because I WANT to be distracted though.

Click to expand...

This is a big issue for me, I guess I'm not interested in my work enough. I'll do damn near anything to get around having to sit down and grind on my projects. However, I wonder if there's ANY real work out there that I WOULD love to do. I go back and forth between wonder if there are just hard workers and slackers in the world, or people who enjoy what they do and people who don't. Probably a mix of both. Best you can do is hope to be in the middle somewhere. Right now I'm sort of a slacker and I don't really care about what I'm doing. It's possibly a double whammy effect.

At the same time, I know it could be much worse. I've done a true manual labor job full-time (working on a construction crew), and that sh*t is terrible. But perhaps there are people out there who like to build stuff and enjoy it, I don't really know.

Thank you for the replies fellas. Speed Dawg I hear you about the boundaries. I have been able to enforce that somewhat but it's pretty much clockwork every 2-3 weeks I get a formal complaint on me for "not having a sense of urgency" or "not taking an issue seriously enough". People who want and need stuff from me want it NOW and they all think they are too important to have to be the one to wait. I try to deflect to my boss but he is a yes man and that really doesn't help, I still end up going from task to task to task without having the time to complete any of them before being pulled to the next. As for liking what I do, I like the work most days, but I wish I had a better crew of people to work with sometimes. This is pretty much where I work:

http://www.killingmycareer.com/the-sociopathic-business-model/

I swear this was written by somebody at my workplace ( and it wasn't me lol)

logicallefty said:

Thank you for the replies fellas. Speed Dawg I hear you about the boundaries. I have been able to enforce that somewhat but it's pretty much clockwork every 2-3 weeks I get a formal complaint on me for "not having a sense of urgency" or "not taking an issue seriously enough". People who want and need stuff from me want it NOW and they all think they are too important to have to be the one to wait. I try to deflect to my boss but he is a yes man and that really doesn't help, I still end up going from task to task to task without having the time to complete any of them before being pulled to the next. As for liking what I do, I like the work most days, but I wish I had a better crew of people to work with sometimes. This is pretty much where I work:

http://www.killingmycareer.com/the-sociopathic-business-model/

I swear this was written by somebody at my workplace ( and it wasn't me lol)

Click to expand...

Before you do anything drastic....most of that sociopathic business model behavior comes from leadership, so before you leave your company or similar, investigate and figure out where the source of it is coming from. Then see if that guy is an 'in' guy or is he a guy that is about to be put on the street. Leadership is EVERYTHING in big companies.

Espi makes great points too. People may not like someone who disagrees with them, but if they respect them, they'll keep you around. If you are not respected, people HATE you.

One other thing I'll add - have a great attitude. No, matter, what. A bad attitude ONLY hurts. There has been times when I probably could have been canned at my job but they don't, because I have (or fake, at least) a great attitude about my job. I don't talk sh*t about anyone in the company, and I don't complain about why something cannot be done. You have to find other ways to enforce your boundaries, rather than showing attitude.

But at the end of the day, if you're operating under the sociopathic business model, and it does not appear to be changing, you have to get out.