The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ““Done!”” pod­cast:

Divid­ed anyway

The con­se­quence is that you are not as focused as you need to be to solve the task at hand as well as you would like. Your work becomes frag­ment­ed, you have to return to the task sev­er­al times after being inter­rupt­ed, and you feel increas­ing­ly tired.

At the same time, it would be too flip­pant for me to sim­ply say that you should shut down any chan­nels or inflows of infor­ma­tion that might inter­fere with your focus. You may have a role that requires you to be reached quick­ly from time to time (but not always).

This is why you need to choose an emer­gency channel.

Do this

1. Decide what your emer­gency chan­nel will be, mean­ing the chan­nel where you can be reached even if you are seem­ing­ly unreach­able (which might be nec­es­sary if you have a role that requires you to be reach­able). Per­son­al­ly, I have cho­sen SMS as my emer­gency chan­nel. On Fri­days, when I am free from work, I do not answer the phone, I can­not be reached by email and I do not read chat mes­sages. How­ev­er, any­one who needs to reach me quick­ly does so by send­ing me a text message.
2. Tell those who usu­al­ly need to reach you which chan­nel they should use from now on if it is an emer­gency and they real­ly need to get a hold of you.
3. If you some­times need to be reached by peo­ple you do not have reg­u­lar con­tact with — peo­ple out­side the orga­ni­za­tion, for exam­ple — make it clear in what chan­nel they should try to reach you instead. In my out-of-office mes­sage, which is on when I am off work, I refer to the SMS ​“emer­gency chan­nel”. You can refer to the cor­rect chan­nel in a sta­tus mes­sage in the chat plat­form where you are usu­al­ly present or men­tion the emer­gency chan­nel in your voice­mail mes­sage as an option to ask peo­ple to leave a mes­sage after the beep.
4. An alter­na­tive to choos­ing a spe­cif­ic chan­nel is to be clear about exact­ly which time slot in your unavail­abil­i­ty you are avail­able instead. Phone hours have been around for ages, but sure­ly you could set up an ​“email hour” or fif­teen min­utes of ​“I’m now avail­able in the chat”?

It hap­pens there or not at all

If you decide on what sin­gle ​“chan­nel” you have open for emer­gency con­tin­gen­cies when you with­draw for some rea­son, you will be able to devote your­self more whole­heart­ed­ly to what­ev­er you have with­drawn from reg­u­lar activ­i­ties to do. If you only have one chan­nel to pay atten­tion to, you can turn your back on the oth­ers with a clear con­science at that moment. If noth­ing hap­pens in the emer­gency chan­nel, all is well. You can focus on what you need and want to do right now.

How do you do it?

Do you have any oth­er way to resolve the con­flict between being unavail­able and need­ing to be semi-reach­able? Many might ben­e­fit from your best tip — please write to me and share!

(If you don’t real­ly need to have your phone near­by, try leav­ing it in anoth­er room if you want to think clear­er!)