The Interrupt-Driven Life

One of the problem areas in my adjustment to my new role as Product Manager has been concentration. When my job was to monitor social media, my life (not just at the office) was constantly being interrupted by myriad things needing immediate attention, and "success" for me was simply responding to those things as quickly as possible. These tasks were usually short in duration, probably averaging between two and five minutes, allowing me to move quickly from one to another. Thus, my brain became conditioned to be "interrupt-driven;" it automatically shifts focus to new stimuli—whatever is newest or beeps the loudest gets the attention.

That's not ideal in my new role, which requires me to think about strategy and complex interactions between various entities and ideas. For example, on any given day, I might spend time trying to figure out which product features will provide the greatest benefit to the company, with the concept of "benefit" taking a number of forms (not just financial); later, colleagues and I may meet to discuss how we should price a product, what we should do to improve the user experience in an application, or how can innovate to exploit competitors' weaknesses needs in our industry. There are something like 35 different responsibilities that the Product Manager in a software company should be filling at various times, and most of them take a lot of time and mental effort. None of the common tasks that I mentioned in this paragraph can be done in minutes; each is the result of hours of deep thought, research, analysis, and discussion.

The problem is that the human brain, according to a course I took on Product Management last month, takes 20 minutes to achieve focus. When you are used to short, tactical thinking—rather than long, strategic thinking—20 minutes is a very long time. Exceptionally long. In fact, the odds of going 20 minutes without being interrupted are terrible, unless you have mastered the ability to filter out the "noise" of office life and shut down those elements of daily existence that serve to distract, with little impact on the things that really matter (such as defining the "strategic vision" for a product or any of the other big-picture tasks I described in the previous paragraph).

I do not have that skill—at least, not anymore. Not yet. There are two main culprits:

• Twitter. I am still involved with Twitter, although not as my company's official representative there. I monitor conversation about my products so I can learn what customers are asking for—either directly or by implication—and so that I can observe larger industry trends in conversations that others are having. However, the little alert window that TweetDeck puts in the upper-right corner of my screen calls out to me, hearkening back to my previous role and urging me to make sure somebody isn't slandering our brand. There is great value in being a part of the conversation on Twitter, but it is always going, which means it is always capable of stealing my attention away from something else.
  
• Outlook. E-mail is a giant time-suck. In my brain there lives a goblin, and this goblin tells me to click on every "new e-mail!" notification that blips at me, with its ironically upbeat jingle. I respond to everything, in some cases simply because I do not want to appear rude or disinterested. However, even though I check them and respond right away—almost regardless of what I had been doing at the time—the overwhelming majority of these messages do not need immediate attention. I asked another Product Manager (one who is not interrupt-driven) how he manages not to check e-mail constantly, and how he avoids missing out on important and time-sensitive things. He admitted that letting e-mail sit around unread for minutes or hours has burned him a few times in the past, but it is clear to me that the benefit to him in terms of increased ability to focus on what really matters and needs attention from his unique skill set and knowledge far outweighs the cost and risk of missing a critical e-mail from an executive who wants an answer immediately.

I gave this quite a bit of thought today—during those periods when I wasn't tweeting or e-mailing—and came up with three actions that will hopefully re-train my brain to allow me to spend hours—not minutes—on the things that really matter in my new role.

• Turn off TweetDeck notifications. In fact, do not run TweetDeck at all. Use the Twitter web interface at http://twitter.com. It keeps track of new tweets for you as they come in from the people you follow, so you can easily see what you've missed since you last checked that tab in your browser. It's not ideal if you're using Twitter for customer support, but that's not why I am there anymore.
  
• Turn off Outlook notifications. I don't need to read e-mail as it comes in. Will I drop the ball from time to time? Yes. Will I miss a few opportunities ("Hey, we're going to lunch right now at Takashi. Do you want to come? We're leaving in three minutes.")? Yes. But the upside is huge. Another Product Manager told me, "I answer e-mail in the morning and in the evening; that's it. During the day, I work." And I think he is really good at what he does.
  
• Let people do their jobs so I can do mine. There are people on most of these e-mail threads who are far better qualified to respond than I am. And we have a new social media who does a great job when I don't cut him off and give an answer to a question a product before he has a chance to do so. I don't have enough time or mental energy to do all of these jobs.
  
• Set aside time on my calendar for thinking. And stick to that calendar. Get a conference room and be there for an hour with no computer. The world will not come to an end, will it?

I thought I would share this as my reason why today didn't suck, because the whole thing was revelatory for me, and completely changed the way I approach the concept of "work." But please be patient if it takes me a little longer to respond to your tweet or your e-mail; I'm just doing my job.

(For more reading on overcoming this extremely common workplace form of Attention-Deficit Disorder, see the outstanding online slide show at http://www.43folders.com/2008/08/14/who-moved-my-brain.)