Writing Excuses 21.23: Barrier Breaking: Interruptions

[mbarker]

Writing Excuses 21.23: Barrier Breaking: Interruptions

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-23-barrier-breaking-interruptions

Key Points: interruptions: family, coworkers, doorbells, cats, power outages. Give yourself permission to only get a tiny bit done. Hyperfocus. Breadcrumbs. Systems: office doors, remove social media apps and notifications. Triage mode. How do I manage myself and how do I manage the rest of the world? Systems, conversations. Phone settings. Know yourself. Retrain others or retrain yourself? Interruptions happen, adjust your expectations to match. Start your day with planning, not triage. Create your own swap file, with index cards or Post-it notes. Beware of systems that you think work, but don't.

[Season 21, Episode 23]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 23]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Barrier breaking: interruptions.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] So we're going to be talking about interruptions today, as another form of barriers. When we did the last of our barriers episodes, we talked about the environmental problems that you might run into. This is a very specific environmental problem, which is sometimes your family... We love them. We love them. But they do kind of interrupt us. And it's not always family, sometimes it's coworkers, sometimes it's just something else. Someone comes to the front door. You have to stop writing because you have to go to work. Your cat is adorable, and also very persistent. Power outages. There's a bunch of different things that can cause an interruption. I find that sometimes I don't want to start writing when I have, like, 15 minutes or a half hour because I'm afraid I will get interrupted. So what we want to talk about is how to deal with interruptions so that they are not a barrier to writing. What are some of the strategies that you all use when you are interrupted?

[Howard] It sounds maybe a little trite to say it, but writing 500 words is better than writing zero words. Writing 10 words is better than writing zero words. If I've only got 15 minutes, I... It's a mindset thing. I just have to give my permission, myself permission to only get a tiny bit done. Maybe I'm only going to get 10 words written. Maybe I'm only going to... Lately I've been doing sketch cards. Maybe I'm only going to get one marker color applied to one card. But you know what? That's work that wouldn't have happened if I don't sit down and try to do it. And if I don't get interrupted, hey, maybe I'll get two cards colored.

[Mary Robinette] So, it's interesting you say that, because I've used this exact... I mean, not about cards, but the same conversation with other people and with myself. And I only recently realized that part of what happens with me is that I have ADHD, which I didn't know for most of my life. I didn't get diagnosed until I was 50. And that for much of my life, I would get punished when I dropped into hyperfocus. Because I would miss appointments, I would... Someone would talk to me and I wouldn't hear it, and so I would avoid writing except in situations where I knew that there weren't going to be any repercussions for getting into the zone. So, where I wasn't going to have to get... Deal with getting interrupted.

[Howard] That's fascinating because there's two sides to the consequences there. I mean, side one, if I'm hyperfocused and I get interrupted, I often emerge from the zone angry. And I don't like being angry. And the flip side of that, the other consequence is, if I'm in the zone and I miss something, well, I've missed a thing. That's problematic. Or if I'm in the zone and I'm interrupted and I emerge angry and that spills on to other people, then I've created some external consequences that I don't want. And, for me, by far the most effective tool to dealing with this is being able to articulate the shape of the problem the way that I just did. Because now that I know that that's the shape of the problem, when I think I might be facing it, I'm actually going to emerge from hyperfocus a little less angry, and actually going to take a few more steps to make sure that maybe my phone isn't muted so that the alarms will go off for an appointment. I'm just a little bit more conscious of the fact that the hyperfocus has a downside.

[Erin] For me, I would say, one thing I like to do is think about, like, what is the zone? So, like, am I in the end zone, am I at AutoZone, am I...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Erin!

[Erin] In the strike zone? These are three different zones. So what happens is... What can happen is you can get interrupted...

[Howard] If you're writing romance... I'm not going to finish this sentence.

[laughter]

[Erin] If you are in the middle of something and you get interrupted, I think one thing that I fall prey to is thinking that you'll remember which zone you were in...

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Erin] When you return. You may not. You may take a wrong turn. And so a lot of times what I will do is give myself permission... Unless, like, the... If the house is, like, actually on fire, and I have to, like, grab my cat and run. Fine. I have bigger problems. But if it is not that kind of interruption...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I will try to at least summarize for myself, on the thing that I'm writing, in a Notes app to say it out loud, like, this is where I was and this is what I was thinking at this moment. So that when I come back, I can get back into the zone, and it makes me less upset, because I'm just basically saying I can pause this for a moment and get back into it versus it's going to be lost forever.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I do this too, I call it breadcrumbs. I don't know if you have a name for it. But I will jot down, like, 7ish words sometimes about this is generally where I was headed. And then when I come back, and I look at it, because this is the other trick. You come back and you look at it and even though it's like this is where I was headed, you're not in the same headspace. And so I will often come back and start with a sensory detail and a goal. Actually, what I'll often do is start by rereading what I had just previously written, then do a sensory detail and a goal to get in. But, yeah, I do the same technique of dropping a breadcrumb for myself.

[Erin] And similarly, like, to follow that breadcrumb, sometimes what I'll do is look at where I was and instead of immediately going back to write, I will actually, like, go take a walk or something. Like, I'll actually try to, like, think about where I'm like, okay, what was I getting at with these five words that I thought were very deep at the time, but now I don't understand them completely. And I will try to, like, think, okay, what was it? Let me, like, eat something really quick or have a drink of tea while I get back into the right place, and then I can go from there.

[DongWon] Yeah, it's interesting. This is probably my biggest productivity issue, is interruptions. And it's one that I have not, like, solved for myself yet. It continues to be a problem. And any... Whenever I try to put systems around it, in terms of, like, oh, I'm going to contain the interruptions. There's some I can do that with. Like, I have an office door. I can close it. And when it's closed, my partner knows not to interrupt me unless it's... The house is on fire. Right? And that's an easy solution. So there's, like, some simple stuff you can do. Right? Like, I have mostly removed social media apps from my life, and so those aren't interrupting me in terms of those notifications. But a lot of my work life is necessarily oriented around lots of interruptions. Whether that's I have random meetings throughout the day that I'm going to have to hop on Zoom for. Incoming emails of this is an emergency, this is a crisis. Text from people about, like, issues that are coming up, that's coming across by text messages, Signal, Discord, email, all of these things that are actually people calling me while I'm at work, I sort of necessarily need to be open to interruptions, to respond to things. And... So I spend a lot of my life in triage mode of this is a crisis, that needs to be dealt with right now, this can wait, this is a long-term task. The end result of living your life in triage mode is Category 2 sometimes gets dealt with, category 3's a black hole that disappears because it's out of my line of sight. And so, that is the biggest thing that's a problem for me, and is consistently an issue in terms of me staying on top of certain tasks, me getting back to people in a timely way. And it's a thing that I'm constantly working on and struggling with. And the thing that I also want to say is this entire topic deeply, deeply intersects with neurodiversions. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And, Mary Robinette, you kind of brought this stuff up with ADHD. This intersects with people who are on the autism spectrum. This intersects with people who have a variety of different neurodivergences, mental health issues, things like that that cause you to respond to different stimuli in different ways. And one thing that's really common is, task switching has a very high cost for some people and a lower cost for other people. I've spent a lot of my life thinking my task switching was quite low in terms of cost, but I've come to realize it's not true. And, in part, my life requires a very high amount of task switching, which means that there's a lot of, like, churn in my day. And then suddenly I'll be like, how is it 3 o'clock already? And I've only accomplished a quarter of the things I set out to do today? Right? And it's because I've had to do all these little tasks, I've had to respond to all these little emails, and I don't have a good solution to any of these things. Right? Some people suggest you bundle it, you package, like, certain types of tasks together, and that I only look at my email at this time and I only look at it at this time, but if I do that, that causes other cascading problems. Anyways, I'm just complaining at this point, so...

[laughter]

[Howard] You've raised an important point. Which is that there are two sides to the interruption problem period one is how do I manage myself when I'm interrupted, and the other is how do I manage the rest of the world so that it will stop interrupting me?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Which is like, my job requires that kind of interruption. If you have small children, it requires interruptions. If you have a dog, that dog's going to need to get walked and fed. There's all kinds of different things that are unavoidable as part of your life, that will be interrupting you at some point.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think the 'at some point' is also a thing... When you were talking about neurodivergence, it's like, yes, I have ADHD, depression, these things, but I also know that when I am fatigued, I get, like, all these symptoms ratchet up, and I know from other people that even if they don't, if they are somehow miraculously not neurodivergent, that fatigue or other stressors can cause the same symptoms of making decisions in that moment of interruption. So you had talked about having systems, and I think coming up with systems so that when it happens, like Erin's system can be one of the things that can help. So when we come back from the break, we're going to talk a little bit about some systems.

[Mary Robinette] So, systems. The reason I want to talk about this is I find that one of the things that can help is to have an answer to a problem before the problem arises. So that when it arises, you know, oh, this is how I deal with it. Like Howard was saying earlier, before the break, that he knows this is how he behaves when his hyperfocus is interrupted. You can have a system. It's like, okay, this is how it happens. You can also have that conversation with your family. And if you have that conversation with your family, or whoever you're cohabitating with, coworker, why are you cohabitating with a coworker? You're traveling with them on a business trip. Anyway. But if you can have that conversation with people before the problem arises, so, before they interrupt you, you can say, hey, I find that when I'm working, I need X. One example would be, like, you want to spend time with your family, but you also need to get writing done. If you sit down with your family and say, and I realize not everybody has the same relationship with family. I'm using generic terms here. But if you sit down with someone who cares about you...

[DongWon] Family, housemates, whatever...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That... And you say, hey, I have writing done, and I found that I get distracted easily. Can you help me? Can we come up with a system so that you can know when I'm writing, so that I can guard my safe time. Or, I want to spend time with you. Can you sit down with me with a calendar and we can look at when I can write that doesn't take me away from spending time with you? If you can come up with those systems, so that when you get interrupted, it's only emergencies, then it's going to be a lot easier on everyone involved.

[DongWon] And the thing I will also point out is in terms of things like that, there's lots of digital tools that can help you. Your phone has lots of settings that allow you to filter who comes through your messages and who doesn't. Right? Have I done this on my phone? Absolutely not. That would take me spending 10 minutes to figure it out.

[laughter]

[DongWon] For other people, you can set it up so that only your mom can call you in case she has a health emergency or something like that. Right? Or, like, there's things that if somebody repeat calls, it'll break through your do not disturb settings. Right? So there are lots of filters and settings you can put on your phone of, like, I'm in work mode. Then if you have an iPhone, they've added, like, many different layers of focus modes, do not disturb, sleep mode, things like that.

[Mary Robinette] Android does the same thing.

[DongWon] Different layers of interruptibility. And I encourage you to figure out those digital tools and use them as they are helpful to you. Again, have I done this in my life? No.

[Mary Robinette] We'll do it after the episode. It'll take 5 minutes.

[Howard] 1987. Timothy Lister, Tom Demarco wrote a book called peopleware that was about... Basically, it was about how writing software is different than building cars on an assembly line. And they explored this thing, this very thing that we're talking about. Because corporations and large workplaces were not organized well. People didn't know how to build them so that knowledge workers, people who write code, was mostly what they were talking about, could get into the zone for hours at a time and get work done. One of these...

[DongWon] That's the problem with the open plan office. Somehow it...

[Howard] That's the problem with the open plan office. One of the first things that they said that you need to throw out is the intercom. The only thing that should go over the intercom is the building's on fire, please get up and leave. Because the intercom interrupts everyone. So you don't use that. And they drew a comparison between two companies, one of which did all of these things that were cool, but were very expensive in terms of protecting employees' ability to not be interrupted, and the other didn't. And one of the companies, none of us had ever heard of, and the other one was IBM who had gone on to make all kinds of stuff. And I worked in the software industry from 1993 until 2004. Started working there 5 years after this book was published. And the lessons that I learned as a knowledge worker in an office space trying to defend my ability to get into the zone... I wasn't writing code, I was writing product requirements. I was basically filling spreadsheet cells with amazingly good ideas that I had. Right. Said with sarcasm. But between meetings and phone calls and knocks on the door and everything... We all had rafts, truckloads of strategies for protecting our time. And when I left Novell, to be a cartoonist full time, it was so easy for me to be able to defend my time, because I was now defending it against a much smaller group of people who were much more invested in me being successful.

[Erin] It's funny. Like, I love that. I... I was like, ooh, 1987. I don't know. Like, seems like a cool year.

[Mary Robinette] I graduated from high school then.

[DongWon] I was five.

[laughter]

[Erin] So, I was thinking about... I'm going to leave that... We'll leave that in the past. But I think that a lot of it is knowing yourself.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And so, I've talked before on the podcast about the concept of putting the shoe rack by the door, figuring out who you are, and then hacking your life as much as you can to match it. And what I find really interesting is I live alone, and so I actually am like a reverse, which is I like micro interruptions that stop me from wandering off mind-wise. What I mean by that is, like, if I think maybe an interesting email will be coming in, and I turn off all email on my computer, I will spend a lot of time going back to check...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To see if it came in. Did it come in, did it not come in, what's going on? I got a smartwatch so that it will ping me when an email that's important comes in, and I can, because I know myself, look at it and be like, okay, great, I'll deal with that in a few minutes, but I haven't missed anything. Because I'm alone in the house, and it's like I'm the only one paying attention to things. Same with, like, I had an apartment at one point that had a broken doorbell. And I actually got a little, like, camera that only was on the mat, so that when a package was delivered, I would know. As opposed to going back and checking every...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] 22 seconds...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] To see, like, was the package delivered? Was the package delivered? Because I was creating, like, more interruptions for myself than the momentary interruption. And once I knew what the interruption would be, when it would happen, what it would feel like, and how I would deal with it, I was able to make it a part of my zone. It's like occasionally getting a buzz and seeing that there's a package there and then figuring out what to do with it. So, really, like, monitoring when you're feeling interrupted, what's happening in your brain? What's the thing that's holding you up, and then how can you attack that part of the problem?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think what we're talking about here is that you can either retrain others around you or you can retrain yourself. And you have a lot more control retraining your own self. It's nice if you can have a collaborative thing with other people, but, like, I'm going to give two examples. Because I find them funny. So, my dad, when I was... While my mom was alive, we had this rule that he could only call me if it was time sensitive and about Mom. Because I couldn't put my phone on do not disturb, like, I couldn't put it on airplane mode which used to be my mode for protecting time. So we had this rule. We are recording Writing Excuses. This is, unfortunately, you don't get to hear this because we did stop recording, but we were recording Writing Excuses. I'm in the booth. Phone rings. It's my dad. And he says, this is time sensitive and it is about your mom. I'm like, oh, my God. So I'm out of the booth, I'm halfway down the stairs, and he says, I can't find the egg beater.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I got the onions on the stove...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And I'm making her some fried eggs, and I can't find the egg beater. And I'm like, you can beat eggs with a fork! And, you can? So, I love my dad. He's an engineer before he retired. I don't understand how we were having this conversation when he was in his 80s, but... The point is that sometimes...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Even when you retrain them, even when you have an agreement, even when they want to be helpful, they can still be a barrier. Sometimes you yourself are the barrier. So, coming up with a strategy for how to handle the interruption once it happens. The other analogy... Or other story is my cat, Elsie, the one who uses buttons to talk. Before she got buttons, I would get up and she'd want to play a little bit in the morning. But I would start working. And the morning was my working time. With buttons, I have learned that morning is the time that she most wants to play, and that if I don't play with her for half an hour or 40 minutes, which is not an unreasonable time to play with your pet, by the way, that she is going to be bored for the rest of the day. But if I get up and I spend that time with her, then the rest of the day is totally open for writing. She will go take a nap. So, sometimes it's often about, like, I can shift my behavior much more easily than I can shift hers in that case. But in both cases, like, I have to have a plan and I have to have strategies on what I'm going to do.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, that sort of dovetails with sort of two things I've been implementing in my life that do seem to help. One is, the first is just accepting that interruptions are going to happen, and to adjust my expectations accordingly and how I communicate those expectations to other people. Right? So this keeps me from trying to set unrealistic timelines for myself, and adjust my own expectations of what my day is going to look like. Right? If I'm planning my day around the ideal version where nobody sends me an annoying email...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Nobody texts me, and I don't get a random spam call about some loan offer that doesn't exist, then... If I plan my day as that, the thing that's never going to happen, then I'm always going to be disappointed and frustrated at the end of the day. Right? But if I learn to adjust my expectations to something more realistic and have more generosity with myself in terms of what I'm going to accomplish today, then I think that makes it that much more manageable and lets me be more realistic about how I'm actually moving through the world. And then the second thing is, again, kind of what you're saying is adjusting my own behavior around that. And a thing that I find is that if I take 30 minutes in the morning... The problem with working from home is, like, you wake up, you roll out of bed, and you're at work. You know what I mean? And if I instead say to myself, no, I'm spending 20, 30 minutes not working in the morning. I'm going to make my coffee, I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to sit with my notebook, I'll make some notes about what my plan for the day is before I open my email. Because if the first thing I do is get out of bed and open my email, then immediately I'm just in it. Right? And I'm just in triage mode, and I can't do any of that planning around it that will help me manage my day. Do I do this more than 2 days a week? No. But we're working on it. You know what I mean? And I think that's also something that's just like... You won't be perfect about these things. You have to learn to integrate that into your expectations and your processes.

[Howard] Returning for a brief moment to computer history. Modern...

[DongWon] The year was 1987.

[Howard] No. Modern computers are so much more resilient to being crashed, being interrupted, power outages, whatever. And it used to be, the horror story was, oh, no, the power went out and I lost my entire manuscript. Now, unless you're using ancient software on Ancient Hardware, oh, no, the power went out, and when it booted up, the file was missing the last two pages. The principal here is that computers have gotten much smarter about creating, and I'm going to use old terminology because I'm not in the business anymore... About creating swap files and putting pointers on things. The idea that when you task swap, and being interrupted is a task swap, you don't just drop what you're doing and move on to the next thing. You create a swap file, you store some... It's like the seven words that you write. It's whatever the reminders are. It's the idea that I am caching some stuff so that when I come back to it, I come back to it cleanly instead of coming back and finding out that my memory of it is completely corrupt. I have loved watching computers get better at this. I have despaired at myself getting worse at this as I get older. But I recognize that those same strategies apply. I started surrounding myself with index cards and Post-it notes. And I will create a manual swap file. Was doing this thing. And the note. And then I get up and I go... And I sit back down and I'm like, where the heck was I? Oh, someone left me a note. Oh, goodness. And We're Off to the Races.

[Erin] I will also say that, like, what you said about memory being corrupt, and, DongWon, what you said about, like, going for the ideal day, is also to learn that sometimes you create patterns that you think work...

[laughter]

[Erin] And you just... You're just...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Lying... Lied to yourself.

[Howard] Yep.

[Erin] But for some reason, it worked, like, one time. It's like one day you had a perfect day.

[Howard] It's so rare that...

[Erin] And you were like, it's going to be like this...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] From here on out.

[DongWon] Oh, if I do this one thing, that solves it. And then 6 months later, I'm like, that didn't... That's not how it works.

[Mary Robinette] I just need another notebook.

[Erin] Exactly. One that I find is the... Like, I can outrun sleep is one that I often...

[Mary Robinette] I've never seen you do that.

[Erin] And...

[DongWon] Yeah. I've never done this myself.

[Erin] Sometimes, I've learned that there are times in which you are better off napping...

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] For 15 minutes...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And getting back up if you really... I wouldn't do it everyday... Then you are trying to press through the sleep deprivation, because...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Your brain is just lying to you that, like, oh, any second now you'll be finished if you just keep pressing through.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But you never know it in the moment. And so, like, because being really sleep deprived is like being a little tipsy, and like a tipsy person, you have bad ideas about the world at that moment. Or like a hungry person in a grocery store. This is why they tell you, don't go to the grocery store hungry. You'll just start buying stuff. And so sometimes I have to remind myself, like, actually kind of, like, right down mental rules. And so when it is really late and I'm, like, I'm just going to push through for another hour, I will be like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] This is a lie. This is a lie, go to sleep.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Wake up and see if you still feel this way. And I will do it and be like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad that my past self is trying to train myself out of the habits...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That I thought were working for me and are not.

[DongWon] Well, this dovetails with a whole other conversation about burnout that we don't have time to get into right now. But it's... That thing of, like, when you just assume that you can keep going, keep doing the thing and not putting brakes for rest into place, lead you to a place of burnout. And I do think this is really tied to interruptions, because it's that task switching, that friction, that I think eats more cycles than you think it does.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? And so again, so much of it is adjusting your own expectations of what is accomplishable and adjusting the expectations of people around you. Now, sometimes, those expectations are your family or your boss or your agent, who's like, where's this manuscript? You know what I mean? Like, they're... Sometimes those are very hard to adjust, but as much as you can, find ways to carve out that space for yourself, and that starts with being able to be self-aware and honest with yourself about what is possible.

[Mary Robinette] So with that...

[DongWon] [garbled] as if I was good at doing that ever.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, aspirations. Right?

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] You train towards what you want to be.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] So with that, I have homework for you, which actually involves training you to handle interruptions in a low stakes environment. I want you to set a series of alarms for yourself. Ready? So you're going to set an alarm for 5 minutes. And then you're going to have another one that is 7 minutes. Then you're going to have another one that is at 9 minutes. And then another one that is at 15 minutes. [for 2 minute break, should be 11 minutes] So what I'm doing here is I'm giving you some random interruptions. After the first interruption, you're going to take a 2 minute break. That's what happens when we do that 5 to 7. That's a 2 minute break. You're going to get two breaks that are 2 minutes long. So when that alarm happens, I want you to jot a breadcrumb to yourself. Jot a note to yourself, Post-It, whatever, this is what I was working on. And then I want you to get up and walk around. And then start writing again when that...

[Howard] When the 7 minute alarm...

[Mary Robinette] When the 7 minute alarm happens. So that you've got another span where you're going to get a little bit more writing done. It's going to be annoying. But it's a good way to practice it at a time when you have control over the situation.

[Mary Robinette] And then, that means that you are out of excuses. Now go set some alarms and write.