18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done (17 page)

On the other hand, we’ve all felt Nate’s pain. The question is: How can we spend time where we add the most value and let go of the rest?

We need a way to quickly and confidently identify and reduce our extraneous commitments, to know for sure whether we should deal with something or avoid it, and to manage our own desire to be available always. I propose a little test that every commitment should pass before you agree to it. When someone comes to you with a request, ask yourself three questions:

If the request fails the test—if the answer to any one of these questions is no—then don’t do it. Pass it to someone else (the right person), schedule it for another time (the right time), or wait until you have the information you need (either you or someone else needs to get it).

Ideally, it’s best not to be interrupted. But sometimes an interruption will be important and appropriate. For example, what if your boss is the person who interrupts you? Or what if you’re on vacation and a critical client reaches out with a time-sensitive and crucial question?

These three questions offer a clear, easy, and consistent
way of knowing when to respond, so you can resist the temptation to respond to everything.

If your boss asks you to do something and her request fails the test, it’s not just okay—it’s useful—to push back or redirect so the work is completed productively. It’s not helpful to you, your boss, or your organization if you waste your time on the wrong work.

That’s the irony. We try to be so available because we want to be helpful. And yet being overwhelmed with tasks—especially those we consider to be a waste of our time—is exactly what will make us unhelpful.

When we get a meeting request that doesn’t pass the test, we should decline. When we’re cc’d on an email that doesn’t pass the test, we need to ask the sender to remove us from the list before we get caught up in the flurry of
REPLY ALL
responses. And a fifty-page presentation needs to pass the test before we read it (and even then, it’s worth an email asking which are the critical pages to review).

A few weeks after sharing the three questions with Nate, I called him at his office at around 6
PM
to see how it was going. I guess it was going well, because I never reached him. He had already gone home.

I
was in my home office, on the phone with a new client, when I heard a knock on the door. I looked at my watch: It was 4
PM
, the time my daughters, Isabelle and Sophia, come home from school. Generally I love taking a break at this time and hearing about their day.

But I have a rule: If the door to my office is closed, they have to knock once. If I answer, they can come in. If I’m silent, it means I don’t want to be disturbed and they have to wait until I come out.

Well, this time, not wanting my call to be unprofessionally interrupted, I remained silent. But they kept knocking and, eventually, just walked in. I was stunned! What about my rule? I signaled for them to be silent but let them stay in the room until the call was over.

After my phone call, I asked them why they had disobeyed my rule.

“But Daddy,” Isabelle said, “you like when we just come
in. We did it yesterday and the day before and you didn’t say no.”

I had broken the cardinal rule of rules:
Never break a rule
.

I should know better. Just a few days earlier, after a speech I had given about time management to the top leaders of a large pharmaceutical company, one leader, Sean, approached me with a question. How could he stop his secretary from interrupting him?

“I’ll have the door shut and Brahms playing on the stereo—I mean, how much more obvious can I be?—and she’ll walk in and ask me a question. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it’s a distraction, and it throws me off. I tell her not to, but she does it anyway.”

Sean is already ahead of the game. He realizes something most of us miss: It’s hard to recover from an interruption. In a study conducted by Microsoft Corporation, researchers taped twenty-nine hours of people working and found that, on average, they were interrupted four times per hour. That’s not surprising.

But there’s more, and this part is surprising: Forty percent of the time they did not resume the task they were working on before they were disrupted. And it gets worse: The more complex the task, the less likely the person was to return to it.

That means we are most often derailed from completing our most important work.

“So,” I asked Sean, “what do you say when she interrupts you?”

“I remind her that I told her I didn’t want to be disturbed.”

“Great. Then?”

“Then she tells me it will just take a second and asks me a question or talks to me about an issue.”

“And?”

“Well, I already stopped doing what I was doing before and I don’t want to seem mean or rude, so I give her what she needs and then ask her not to disturb me again.”

That’s Sean’s mistake. And mine. And perhaps, if you find that people don’t always do what you ask, yours, too. We like being liked. We’re too nice. We don’t want to appear rude.

Unfortunately, it’s a bad strategy. Because setting a rule and then letting people break it doesn’t make them like you—it just makes them ignore you.

If Sean wants his secretary to listen to him, he needs to be consistent; no exceptions. On the other hand, he also needs to understand why she’s constantly disturbing him. Sean travels and is often out of his office, so his secretary is never sure when she will have the opportunity to connect with him. But when he’s in the office, she knows she can reach him. She’s not being obnoxious. On the contrary, she’s being diligent.

To solve his problem and stop the interruptions, Sean needs to do two things:

“And if it’s a short question? Like: What time is your lunch appointment today?” Sean challenged me.

“I know it’s hard. Silly even. But do not answer her. Just tell her you cannot be disturbed and let the silence sit there. If you want her to respect the rule, she needs to see that you won’t break it. Even if maybe, in that situation, it makes sense to break it. It’s a slippery slope.”

As Sean listened to me, he shuddered slightly at the thought. “That will be very uncomfortable,” he finally said.

“That’s the point,” I told him. “You want it to feel uncomfortable. You want
her
to feel uncomfortable. That’s what will prevent her from interrupting you again.”

Later, if he wants, he can explain that his work requires total concentration and even a small interruption will cause him to lose his train of thought. But not at the time. Because an explanation at the time will reduce the discomfort.

Think of it this way: Ultimately, people feel safer knowing what the boundaries are. It may seem harsh at the time, but in the long run it reduces their stress and uncertainty. People prefer to know where they stand.

“You’re right,” I told Isabelle after she called me on my inconsistency. “It’s hard not to break my own rule because I love seeing you guys so much. But the rule really is important and I can’t break it again.”

The next day I was working on the computer when, as
expected, Isabelle and Sophia knocked and then walked in without waiting for my response.

I turned to look at them. “I adore you guys. But I’m working now. Whatever it is, it needs to wait until I’m done,” I said.

“But Daddy…”

“Sorry,” I repeated.

“But we just…”

“Sorry, I can’t be disturbed now,” I said once more, feeling like a jerk. I wanted to see them. I even worried for a second that they really needed me. What if one of them was hurt? What if there was a fire in the kitchen? But I didn’t look up. My wife was home. If there was a fire, she would put it out. She’s very good at that.

A few days later, they tried again, but I didn’t waver. And they haven’t broken the rule since.

They learned that when I said no, I meant it. And eventually, they came to respect my boundary.

S
hould I bother to have the conversation with her? What do you think?” Mike, a marketing director, was telling me about Lorraine, one of his employees, who had done a few things to frustrate him. She arrived late to a meeting with a client. Not that late—only ten minutes. Still, it didn’t look good.

Then, a few days later, she was supposed to email him some information by 4
PM
and didn’t do it until 6
PM
. I know, he told me, not a big deal. He didn’t really need it until the next morning. Still.

And then, not long after, he received a voice mail from her saying she wouldn’t be able to make a conference call they had planned with a colleague in another office. The call was an internal matter. Nothing time-sensitive. But she didn’t give him a reason, and that bothered Mike.

“None of these things are a big deal,” Mike told me,
“and she’s a great employee. But I’m annoyed. Should I say something or shrug it off?”

Trying to decide whether to talk to someone about something is a surprisingly time-consuming activity. Should we? Shouldn’t we? Maybe we talk to three other people to ask their advice—which takes more of our time and their time.

So I have a rule for dealing with these types of situations—times when I’m not sure if it’s worth raising an issue. I need a rule, because it’s often hard to know if something’s a big enough deal to address until it’s too late and then, well, it’s too late. It’s already gotten out of hand. On the flip side, if I jump on every single issue the first time it comes up, then, well,
I’ll
be out of hand.

So the first time someone does something that makes me feel uncomfortable, I simply notice it. The second time, I acknowledge that the first time was not an isolated event or an accident but a potential pattern, and I begin to observe more closely and plan my response. The third time? The third time I always speak to the person about it. It’s my rule of three.

If someone makes a joke about my consulting rates—maybe they say something like, “well, with rates like those, it’s a good thing you add value (chuckle, chuckle)”—I might laugh along with them but I notice my discomfort. The second time, I smile but don’t laugh. The third time I say, “This is the third time you’ve joked about my rates—I know it’s a joke, but I also wonder if you feel that they exceed my value. If so, I’d like to talk about it with you.”

If you come late to a meeting once, I notice. Three times? I bring it up.

The first time you demonstrate a lack of teamwork, I notice. The third time? I need to better understand your commitment to the group.

I always say some version of, “I’ve noticed something three times and I want to discuss it with you.” That way we both know it’s a trend.

Is it okay to talk to them about it the first time? Sure. You don’t have to wait. But everyone slips once or twice. Just don’t let it go more than three times without having a conversation. Three is a good rule of thumb because it allows you to act with confidence that it’s not all in your head. And in these situations, confidence is critical to your ability to speak with authority.

“So,” Mike said to me after I explained my rule of three, “are you saying I should talk to her about it?”

“I can’t help but notice you’ve asked me that same question three times,” I said. “What do you think?”

A
t 6
PM
, Eleanor was looking tense. “We are so late!” she said.

After a great day of skiing in the Catskills, we were driving back to New York City for a dinner party that was called for 7
PM
.

“What do you mean?” I responded. “The party doesn’t start for an hour. We’ve got plenty of time.”

“Peter.” She didn’t hide her annoyance. “We’re a hundred miles from the city. There’s no way we can make it on time.”

“But we’re not late
yet
.” I smiled. “We’re still an hour early.”

This explains why I am always late and Eleanor is always on time. Eleanor, you see, plans for transition time.

The night before the party, she figured out that if we needed to be there by 7
PM
, we should plan to arrive by 6:45, which meant leaving our apartment in New York City
at 6:15, which meant arriving at the apartment by 5:30, in time to drop off our bags, take showers, and dress, which meant arriving in New York City at 5 to give us time to park the car, which meant leaving Windham ski mountain at 2:15, in case there was traffic, which meant stopping skiing at 1:15, giving us time to pack up and clean the house, which meant starting skiing at 8 in the morning if we were going to get in any decent runs, which meant waking up at 6:30, which meant going to sleep by 10:30 so we could get our full eight hours.

“Uh-oh,” I had said to her the night before as I looked at my watch. “It’s eleven o’clock. We’re already thirty minutes late for tomorrow night’s party.”

Eleanor, of course and as usual, is right. The only way to get somewhere on time is to plan for it, taking into account each time-consuming step.

My intentions are good. I don’t like being late. Most people who are late don’t
like
being late. And I never
plan
to be late or
intend
to be late. I understand that it’s disrespectful and unprofessional. Not to mention uncomfortable.