Interruptions still happen, of course. When one does, we suggest letting the person know upfront that you’re concentrating on something, and asking them if it’s urgent. And if you’re the person doing the interrupting, try not to get offended when you get asked if your needs are urgent.
OMG yes big fan of this. Setting expectations up front for this kind of behaviour is great. Without a 'culture' for allowing people to stay focused without an immediate interruption, I have always found it hard to explain to people interrupting me why they could have used an asynchronous communication tool, like Slack/HipChat/email, for non-urgent questions.
Trying to figure out how to tackle this issue right now as we just went to an open floor-plan. Wondering if getting all of the team using https://blink1.thingm.com/ with a standard set of color code conventions (red=Do Not Disturb) would work better. The headphones trick doesn't seem to be sending any message at all.
Can't you just have a card on everyone's desk. One side is green, one side is red. If you put the red side up, it means do not disturb? I don't mean this in any way as a personal attack on you, but tech culture in general sometimes gets too focused on using technology instead of just finding a solution that works. Sometimes it's good to take a step back and ask again what the goal is.
The headphones act can be unconscious, seeking silence, whereas a card is more abstract and could have stale state. My fave is putting in earbuds, then noise-cancelling headphones, and no music. The earbuds reduce subsonic cancelling pressure.
Sometimes people are just listening to music and could be interrupted. How do we distinguish this form?
Do you like the open floor plan? The company I work for is big on having everybody in an office with a door. A closed door indicates do-not-disturb. It also helps keep the noise down. After working this way for a couple of years, I don't think I'd want to go back to an open plan or even cubes.
There are pros and cons to both. At my previous job I had an office and felt that it took a lot of extra inertia to get a technical conversation going between people as you felt like you were invading their private space in order to talk. While this barrier to entry has been removed with the open floor plan I think it can easily swing too far in the other direction if safeguards are not added. I can no longer get 30 minutes to actually concentrate on coding without getting an interruption from others on my team.
Wearing headphones
Working away from normal desk
Interruptions still happen, of course. When one does, we suggest letting the person know upfront that you’re concentrating on something, and asking them if it’s urgent. And if you’re the person doing the interrupting, try not to get offended when you get asked if your needs are urgent.
OMG yes big fan of this. Setting expectations up front for this kind of behaviour is great. Without a 'culture' for allowing people to stay focused without an immediate interruption, I have always found it hard to explain to people interrupting me why they could have used an asynchronous communication tool, like Slack/HipChat/email, for non-urgent questions.