Sounds like you've been burned along the way. You know, everybody has distractions and everybody has interruptions. When the President gets interrupted, it's usually important or urgent or both.
Why wait for it to be important or urgent? If distraction-free work is irrelevant, why don't we have the President take the coffee orders?
Because distraction-free work ISN'T irrelevant. We have someone else take the coffee orders. As far as I know, the President has a large staff of people whose job is, in part, to narrow the distractions to the President as much as possible.
It's the job. When a receptionist answers the phone, it may or not be important or urgent, but it's part of the job.
Of course it's part of the receptionist's job. That's why there IS a receptionist. His or her job is to funnel interruptions down to a single point, so that those interruptions don't interrupt other people. A receptionist is a role that reduces interruptions and distractions. A receptionist represents the fact that we CAN control distraction and interruption.
I think that it was Tom DeMarco that told a story about an office where the programmers were scolded for not immediately picking up their phones, because if they didn't pick them up they'd roll through to the receptionist, and the receptionist had work to do and was too busy to pick up the phones.
Edited to add: Here it is--a quote from a memo quoted in DeMarco's PeopleWare:
"It has come to my attention that many of you, when you are busy, are letting your phones ring for three rings and thus get switched over to one of the secretaries. With all these interruptions, the secretaries can never get any productive work done. The official policy here is that when you’re at your desk you will answer your phone before the third ring..."
Of course, nowadays the calls would go to voicemail, but there are still offices where it's not OK to let your voicemail sit longer than it takes for you to get off the previous call.
Anyone who succeeds in food service has to be good in an interruption-driven environment.
The cooks in food service, as far as I know, usually
cook. They generally don't also wait tables, answer the phone, hand out advertising flyers, and do valet parking. They focus. Similarly, the valet parkers don't butter the bread for the grilled cheese sandwiches.
I believe that the only thing we truly have control over is our reaction to distraction and interruption.
We have plenty of control, if we choose to take it--where "we" refers to the company, if not every individual in the company.
We can hire receptionists. We can organize programming teams so that one member is the sacrificial member for any given day, dealing with all of the calls and interruptions while the other programmers focus on programming. (And not just programmers--those secretaries in the DeMarco example could also benefit from this scheme, as could a wide variety of jobs that include both impromptu interruptions and productive work.) We can replace IMs and phone calls with emails. We can minimize meetings and corral them to specific days and times. We can return to offices with doors that close. When there are four projects to get done in a year, we can do them by doing one project for three months at a time, instead of four projects in tandem for twelve months--and we may well be rewarded by finding that they get done in eight months instead of a year.
There are countless things that we can do, if we stop pretending that there's nothing that we can do.
