This week
The underrated luxury of finishing a thought
You've answered every message, helped a colleague find something and made it through two calls. Now you can get back to the thing you were working on this morning.
First, you just have to remember what you were thinking.
The questions were quick. Getting back into the problem takes a little longer. You reread the paragraph, reopen the tabs, work out where you were going with all of it. By the next interruption, you might even be making progress.
One of the quieter benefits of remote work is having more say over when you switch tasks. You can find a place that suits you, close the door if you have one, and let a message wait until you've finished what you're doing. That last bit matters as much as the door.
A study published in Organization Science followed 219 employees at a large US university with a healthcare system over a working week, asking them to report their energy levels every hour. Their energy wasn't higher on days they worked from home, but it fluctuated less. The researchers estimated about a third less variation than on office days, and steadier energy was associated with greater self-reported progress toward their daily goals. The effect showed up among people who worked from home often, not among those who rarely did.
The study didn't measure interruptions. In the University of Iowa's account of the research, though, co-author Emily Campion points to the effort of switching into someone else's question and then back to your own work. At home, she argues, people can have more control over what interrupts them.
That control is easy to lose. If every Slack message needs an immediate answer, you still have to keep an ear out for everyone. You can sit in a quiet room and still have your attention on call.
It's a peculiar management choice to hire people to solve complicated problems and then get nervous when they spend twenty minutes thinking about one.
Colleagues and customers still need answers, so protecting that time takes an agreement about what each kind of message needs. A routine question can wait until later that day. Something blocking today's work gets a deadline attached. A real emergency goes to whoever is covering it. Write that down where a new hire will find it, and nobody has to keep checking just in case.
Then managers have to respect it. Telling people to protect their focus while sending "Did you see this?" ten minutes after a routine request teaches them which instruction to follow.
In an interview, I'd ask how quickly people are expected to reply on Slack, what counts as urgent and who decides. If the answer is "we're a pretty responsive team," you've learned something about your afternoons. If you already have the job, the same questions are worth raising with your manager.
A good day's work should leave room to understand a problem, try an approach, catch what you missed and finish. We shouldn't have to call that a luxury.
