When you allow people to interrupt you, they are controlling your time and priorities.
Respond to true emergencies, which must be urgent and important.
99% of the interruptions you have are not important— they can wait and can go through email.
Could you imagine if anytime someone had a random question or non-life threatening situation they called 911?
What’s “more convenient” to them is the cost to you. While you want to help people and be available, be also sure you aren’t trading your productivity for the convenience of someone who knows they can just ping you instead of googling it or using their brain.
You’d not hire them on your team if you didn’t believe they were capable of figuring out basic things themselves, asking another teammate, sending you an email, or stopping what you’re doing to get immediate support.
Same for clients. Train them to respect your time, just like you respect theirs.
Jeff J Hunter, his team, and ours have spent the last two days here in the Philippines tuning our systems to manage the time and productivity of our people at scale.
If you run a hospital, would you allow anyone to call 911 at any time for anything? Would anyone who was thinking about buying a Tesla get a private meeting with Elon Musk to have him explain what the vehicle does?
Your customers should hire you based not on what they don’t want to do, but on what they don’t know how to do.
That’s what Jeff explained today how you make more money with your limited time.
If you’re struggling to make more money and drive results, while being out of time, I’ll bet you aren’t managing interruptions properly.
