"My job is nothing but interruptions"

For some people this is true. A receptionist can't ask callers to wait until she's finished the filing. It's the same for a nurse when a patient's alarm goes off, or for a parent alone with a toddler. A manager's job consists largely of being available to a team, and for someone on a support desk the interruptions are the work.

If that's your job, the first thing to say is that the difficulty is real and isn't a failing of yours. Work that's broken up like this is harder and more tiring than it looks, for all the reasons in chapter 4. People in these roles often think they're disorganised, when the work is fragmented by its nature.

But even in these jobs, there are usually two kinds of work mixed together. There's the reactive part, which is answering, responding and being available. And there's some amount of project work, such as the rota, the monthly report, or the letter that needs thought. The project work is where the damage falls. It can't be done in ninety-second fragments between calls, and it still has to be done. What follows are suggestions of mine, and none has been tested as a set.

Separate the two kinds in time if you possibly can. Even forty-five minutes a day with the door shut, the phone covered by a colleague, or the children with someone else, will move project work further than a whole fragmented day. Trade cover with a colleague, so that you take their calls from two to three and they take yours from three to four.

Make the reactive work its own single task. When you're on the desk, be on the desk. Don't try to write the report between callers, and don't resent the interruptions either, because for that hour they're the job. Done this way, a lot of the strain goes out of it. It comes back when you try to do project work in the gaps and get pulled away from it again and again.

Set hours when people can come to you. A manager who's available to everyone all day can often become available from ten to twelve and two to four with no loss to the team, and with real gain to their own work.

Use parking notes more than anyone. If you know you'll be interrupted, the ten seconds it takes to write "Next, check March figure against invoice 118" is the best investment you have. Leroy's later research, described in chapter 17, found that a short plan of this kind made the interruption less costly.

And be realistic about what such a job allows. If the role gives you no protected time at all and also expects thoughtful project work, that's a contradiction built into the job. It's worth raising with whoever designed it.