John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Personal Success

Idea 52: How to control interruptions

Distinguish between interruptions. Some are good; some are tolerable; and some are avoidable. A conscious act of judgment should govern your response. Once you are interrupted, employ some of the damage-control hints listed below.

You should plan in order to minimize the number of unwelcome interruptions if you're going to manage effectively. One hour of concentrated work is worth four hours broken into five-minute fragments by unwanted callers or trivial telephone queries; to reimmerse yourself in a report after each interruption takes time. So the real time cost of an interruption is much more than the actual time your visitor spends in our office.

Learning to manage these negative interruptions takes resolve ...