Monday, before. An operations manager plans three hours on a capacity problem that has needed solving for a month.
She is interrupted eleven times. A supplier question, two customers escalated from elsewhere, a colleague checking a process, a question about a delivery, somebody who needs a number she knows.
None of them take longer than five minutes. The three hours produce nothing, the capacity problem is still there in June, and nobody would describe her week as having anything wrong with it.
Monday before: the day is fragmented
Eleven interruptions, none individually unreasonable, collectively preventing any sustained work at all.
Monday after: the routine questions are answered elsewhere
Process, supplier and status questions handled without her, which removes most of the eleven before they reach anybody.
Tuesday before: the escalations arrive unfiltered
Anything nobody else can resolve arrives at operations regardless of whether it genuinely needs her.
Tuesday after: the escalations are qualified
What arrives is what actually needs the decision, which is a small fraction of what previously did.
Wednesday before: the same question is asked by four people
Because the answer exists only in her head, which is the documentation problem underneath the interruption problem.
Wednesday after: the answer exists outside her head
Written once and reachable, so the fourth person does not need to ask anybody.
Thursday before: the improvement work never happens
Which is the actual cost. The capacity problem, the process fix and the supplier review all sit unaddressed indefinitely.
Thursday after: there is a clear stretch
Two uninterrupted hours in a week is enough to move something that has been outstanding for months.
Friday before: nothing is measured
No record of how many interruptions, from whom or about what, so the problem cannot be described to anybody.
Friday after: the pattern is visible
What was asked, by whom and how often. Two weeks of tallying produces a list that is shorter than anybody expects and that nobody in the department has ever seen written down.
What the arithmetic actually shows
Eleven interruptions with recovery time is most of a working day, which is the calculation in measuring the cost of an interruption.
What should still interrupt her
Genuine exceptions, decisions requiring authority and anything urgent, which are few and which are what the role is actually for.
What changes for everybody else
They get answers faster than they did by asking her, which is the part nobody anticipates.
What the open door policy actually costs
Managers who encourage people to ask anything at any time have created the interruption pattern deliberately and cannot then complain about it. The alternative is not being unavailable, it is making the answers available without them.
What happens to the person who was interrupting
They get a faster answer than they would have got by waiting for her, which is why this rarely meets the resistance managers expect when they propose it.
Take the routine questions out of the day
An assistant answering the process, status and supplier questions means eleven interruptions become two, and the capacity problem that has been outstanding since March gets an uninterrupted afternoon. The approach is set out in reducing the questions that reach operations at all, a sector example in payroll enquiries from businesses changing provider, and the arithmetic in the time cost of context switching and how chatbots. Start at try, see features, and the sector view sits under small business.