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It can be a personal project I'm working on, work related matters, events coming up that make me nervous etc...
What do you do to let go of these without loosing progress? Do you also feel frustrated to stop working on something before it is finished?
Overall, I don't engage with $JOB more than 8 hours on any given day and never on a weekend. It works for me, and my boss nor team have complained so far. I'm not sure how long the party will last, though.
So be kind, handle the interruption politely and happily, remind the interrupter that you're working and then take measures so that it is more difficult for you to be interrupted in the future.
Go see a therapist.
I've personally learned to embrace the interruptions and find much value in them. Usually interruptions caused by other engineers are often quite useful to the company and sometimes even life enriching. Kind and respectful interactions with others can make the lives of the people around you so much more bearable, and many people suffer alone in their own heads, especially now in such a dark time.
I just keep the 'busy' hours for other people. Thankfully WFH has made it easy. Basically 11AM-7PM are for other people to interrupt me, and for calls. I stay only half-engaged with chats and emails so it doesn't cost in me my cognitive budget and I get a lot of stuff done within the household. Either 7AM-11AM or 7PM-11PM, depending on circumstances, I do work. You know, the 15 minutes of real actual work mentioned i…
Setting aside “helping” time and “focus” time is extremely useful if you can avoid meetings during your focus times; although it is also difficult for me to focus when I have something happening soon (meetings at end of focus time, etc)
If there’s something blocking my progress in a task, I write comments below the task’s card (using whatever kanban software). Then if I leave it to do something else, I’ll be able to replicate the last state in my head by reading the comments
1. In a work situation where I'm relatively senior, I've proactively communicated that I like minimally-interrupting notifications (email>slack>IRL). Even when someone taps me on the shoulder, they're a little sheepish about it, and I can request 30 seconds to jot down a note about where I left off. I also just feel more in control of the situation.
2. At home, I keep a note of the interruptions and talk to my wife about the overall issue after the 'crisis' has passed.
3. When I feel like I can't get something out of my head, I use Siri to write a reminder. I use https://rememberthemilk.com/ but almost anything will work. A poorly thought-out, awkward, run on sentence for the task title, and then if I have more thoughts bursting outof me, I can add those as notes over the course of the day. What's important to realize is that you'll have to 'groom' the task before you can actually do it, but getting it off your chest is priority #1, and if you're supposed to be mostly doing something els eyou won't have time for that in the moment.
More generally, it's all about insisting on 30 seconds to record some placeholder, even if it feels impolite to whoever is interrupting you. I'm 99.9% sure this will not get you fired, and it's worth whatever tiny annoyance it might give them - they should share the annoyance burden of the situation after all! In all likelihood, just having that shred of control will help you feel a ton better and potentially make people think twice about whether they need to tap you on the shoulder in the first place
Before you consider the various answers offered here, consider that attention is the key executive function of consciousness, and the ability to marshall it is a core aspect of what we call “self”.
Everyone is different, in ways that we cannot always control, or even perceive.
When you consider other people’s methods, be aware that your attention mechanisms may work differently and respond differently, whether you like it and want it that way or not.
“Attention” is a hardware module that comes with no instruction booklet.