Say No

I work from home now, but in my days in an office I adopted the following system - a small box on my desk with a green tick on one side and a red cross on the other. Green tick = I can be interrupted at any time, red cross = please interrupt me only for critical emergencies.

In both the old office and my home office I made / make a real effort to set the box to an appropriate value, i.e. don't have the red cross showing all the time or it loses it's meaning. These days it's only my wife who is looking to interrupt me, fortunately, but this system works well. And, hell, one of the benefits of working from home is having your wife 'insist' on taking you away from a 'red cross' task once in a while, heh-heh.

"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things." - Steve Jobs

For what it is worth, I do think Dustin could have been a little more gracious in how he approached it and I mention in my note that it isn't meant to be an excuse to be rude. I actually think it was fine for him to do this to me not because he was my boss but because we had a good relationship. Still, when this happens to me, I usually say something like "I'm in the middle of X right now, can this wait until Y?" -- this tells them what I am doing (and thus allows them to say assert that their topic really is more important) and also gives them a time to follow up.

As a manager of a large organization, I have more respect for people on my team who say no and assert stronger ownership over their time, ideally by being transparent about their priorities. At the end of the day, we just look at impact and managing ones own time is a good sign that someone is focused on impact. Still, I'm sure that isn't the case with every manager in every company (or even every manager in my company)

The open space aspect of the FB offices is usually navigated by people putting headphones on to indicate they are heads down. I do it often even though I'm rarely listening to anything. I agree it isn't for everyone though.

We tend to use headphones for this purpose at Facebook

I had a similar thing happen to me, where I was on the receiving end of "not now". The colleague was on a phone with their backed turned and head down and I couldn't see that they were on the phone. And they responded with a mean "not now". There's just no excuse for it. Even if it's the end-of-world, you can still just say "not now" without any malice.

I'm sure he didn't mean any harm and was under pressure. People make mistakes. And compensation is called compensation for a reason - (stock) compensation for being yelled at, I'm sure makes it feel better - especially when it's early facebook stock.