smithdoug said:
Can we not assume that your boss is aware of what you are working on? Otherwise, you're in a pretty disfunctional workplace. So can we not then infer that your boss has made a value judgment that getting an answer to his question is worth interrupting your work? You may disagree that he made the right judgment, and perhaps he didn't. But he knows what work you are supposed to be doing. You, on the other hand, likely don't know everything he is dealing with.
Does getting an answer to a question even
require interrupting someone's work? If workplaces weren't pretty dysfunctional, there would be little need for GTD. Bosses occupy their positions for any number of reasons, including very legitimate ones, that have nothing to do with their mastery of workflow.
Most people, whatever their station, make no judgement about the impact of their interruptions. They feel the need to ask a question the moment it occurs to them because they're holding it in psychic RAM and try to offload the question before they forget it. That's a reflex, a habit at best, not a value judgement.
My rule for cultivating a low-impedance workflow is to keep nonsocial verbal interactions to an absolute minimum. If I have a question or deliverable for my boss, and if it isn't particularly intricate and doesn't require an immediate response, I always write it out on a note and place it in her de facto in-basket: a single clearing on the otherwise cluttered ledge of her desk. More often than not the note is a Post-It on a document requiring information or authorization. I suspect that most people think it's faster to verbalize a question rather than write it, which is true if they don't mind getting ensnared in the inevitable smalltalk that follows.
If a question does require more interaction or more verbiage than is practical to write on a note, it goes in the Agendas folder; then I wait for a relatively idle moment to bring up whatever's in that folder -- sometimes all of it, sometimes some of it, depending on what's intuitively appropriate.
I wish I could expect the same behavior back from my boss, but this really isn't about who the boss is, who has more to do, or who knows more about the other person's work. It's about being efficient rather than Type-A.
When I started doing this, she actually had a physical in-basket. During the day she would ask me, "What about so-and-so?", and I'd reply, "It's in your in-basket." Then an interesting thing happened. Within two weeks the wire basket disappeared! That definitely confirmed DA's theory that everyone has a certain number of open loops as a comfort zone, below which anxiety ensues: addiction to stress. Years ago, said boss solved her issue with voice mail by getting rid of it (for her), then occasionally questioning the fidelity of the written messages that employees took. Some people use "stuff" like scattered paperwork as a moat against encroaching accountability, and employers are no exception.
I follow the same process with everyone in the office: notes in de facto in-baskets or batched topics in agenda folders, with a bias toward written notes for better signal-to-noise. One interesting side effect of dropping notes is that it prevents a lot of knee jerk whining about why the recipient can't do this, doesn't know that, doesn't have time for this, etc. These kinds of gripes are usually just inarticulate objections to the demand for an immediate response over an appropriate repsonse. Now they can answer at their discretion, and I can relax knowing that I have their imminent reply on my Waiting For list.
I'm glad to see the mention in this thread of de facto in-baskets -- chairs, keyboards, etc. -- for handing things off to the unconverted. Where I work, everyone has physical in-baskets, but no one uses them systemtically. Julie Morgenstern has written about the secret system of informal organization that most "disorganized" people have, and I think the best way for GTD converts to interface with a non-GTD environment is to work with these informal systems, not against them. I gave up trying to dispatch things by email a long time ago, despite DA's insistence that it was the best way to hand off work. Since everyone in my office kept most of their mail in the In folder, more or less unprocessed, email was nowhere near as reliable.
By fiat, a boss' time is more valuable than an employees, but that does not make avoiding arbitrary interruptions of
anyone's work less of a professional courtesy.
