Perhaps, this sounds familiar. Someone walks by your desk and asks for a moment of your time. You want to help them out, so you stop what you are doing, and respond to their request.

When the conversation is over, you look back down at your screen and have no idea what you were doing. It takes an hour to get back into the groove, if you are able to do so. 

Last night I watched this video by Alex Hormozi where he really nailed the problem and provided some solutions to it.

Why Interruptions Destroy a Maker’s Productivity

For our purposes here, you are a Maker if you have to focus for long periods of time to build, write, implement, or otherwise create something.

If you are a Maker, you’re probably acutely familiar with how long it takes to get into a flow state where you are making good progress on some work. The more distractions you can remove, the better the work is. If anything derails your train of thought, it takes a long time to get back into it.

This is why sending you a Slack message can cost you an hour or more of productive time. Maybe half of your day.

What You Can Do About It

There are lots of people or things that can interrupt your flow. Some of the requests for your time are necessary and important, but if better timed can improve your ability to get your work done.

Here are a few ideas on how to minimize and schedule them:

• Block out time in your calendar for time to make. This can prevent meetings from suddenly appearing in what was an open day for testing or coding.

• Close your email and mute chat notifications while you are doing your maker work.

• Talk with your manager, project managers, and others about what you are doing. It’s not that they aren’t important, but can you get back to them later so that your project can be completed? Can meetings be focused on specific days?

This isn’t all inclusive but are some high impact steps to take.

With them in place, we have the obligation to deliver the work. We can’t waste this time, so treat it as a precious resource. We protect it by delivering on our work and getting back to people promptly when we finish our focus time.