What to do about interruptions at work
Your job's so full of digital and relational NOISE, shouldn't 2025 be the year you finally learn to reject interruptions to your tasks? I don't think so, and here's why.
Hello there, Mode/Switchers, 🥳 and a big welcome to all new subscribers! 🫶 Here’s a newsletter to help you do more than cope when work’s a lot in 2025!
Quick intro: I’m Craig, a researcher at Calvin University in currently snowy Grand Rapids. My amazing spouse plays a mean game of pickleball and manages a team in the corporate world. Our kids study & work in Chicago & St. Louis. And our Shih Tzu commands the couch. 🐾 I cycle to work each day, which on snowy days can result in some fairly theatrical wipeouts.🤕 Maybe that’s why I study workplace wellbeing. You can find some of that research in my just-published book, Digital Overwhelm.
And you? Hit reply to this email and help me get to know you and your work situation. What’s great? What sucks? Love to write better in your direction.
Check out the end of this newsletter for big changes & new offerings coming up!
Each Tuesday, you’ll receive this newsletter for free, skimming a workplace trend, a study, a story and a recommended shift. And each Thursday (that’s a change for us), the Mode/Switch crew—Emily, David, LaShone, Ken, and I—roll out a podcast about intergenerational dynamics in late-modern work culture.
But for this newsletter, here’s this week’s question:
You’re working at your desk immersed in a task when, for the fifth time that morning, an email arrives from your manager. Or maybe it’s a cry-for-help text from your new coworker. Or maybe it’s your bestie signaling that something craaaaay-zeeeee has happened.
How do you know when to reject or accept an interruption to your workflow?
The trend
Digital noise, a 2024 Unily research warns, causes technologized interruption for 1 in 3 workers every 15 minutes: “this relentless assault on our attention makes it a constant struggle to maintain employee wellbeing and organizational productivity.”
In response, some workplaces have adopted No Interruption Zones, which, for medical personnel making prescriptions, reportedly reduce medication errors by 60%.
At Calvin University where I teach, we have developed our own no-interruption zone: a tri-annual Writer’s Coop giving distracted professors a quiet space, plenteous snacks, and a free lunch. The condition? You can’t check email for three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon. All you can do, as the poet says, is look in your heart and write.
A related trend: no-interruption vests, which I could definitely rock on a coffee run.
The study
But let’s say you are interrupted. How do you decide whether to check the text or take the call? First things first: you have to understand what’s so bad about interruptions. Is it their frequency? Is it their notification loudness? Or their too-easy accessibility and addictiveness?
Nope, nope, nope, and nein, according to one recent German study.
The researchers found that what makes an interruption detrimental is more qualitative than quantitative. One person’s interruption is another person’s intervention, because everybody has a different “perceived interruption overload.” It’s not how many notifications you receive so much as how heavy they are. What makes them heavy? The sender and the content. If your bestie sends you a DM on Teams, you’ll probably enjoy it. You could 16 DMs that hardly faze you. You could get one email about a performance review that distracts you for days.
But are there instances where the interruption costs are worth it?
The story
Sometimes, in fact, interruptions are your work. My wife and I just watched the first episode of HBO Max’s The Pitt, which is pretty great, by the way. Viewers follow Dr. Rabinavitch (Noah Wyle) and his team through 15 hours of a single ER shift. The banter, the institutional politics, the sensemaking struggle—it’s all engrossing.
The overwhelming takeaway is that every interruption matters as a part of the whole.
Most of us don’t work in a trauma center. But all of us work in organizations where systems and people require “heedful interrelating.” There is such a thing as being too zoomed in on your own tasks. It’s easy to forget that your work contributes to a larger whole, to your organization’s overall project.
It’s easy to forget that a to-do list is not the Ten Commandments.
The Pitt excels in showing new med students struggling to do their tasks in constantly changing circumstances. One gets his finger smashed while transferring a patient to a bed. One passes out completely at the sight of a bloodied foot. Their failures at first to achieve situational awareness contrast sharply with the agile focus of the lead doctors.
The shift
Watch out for interruptions not to your assigned tasks but to your situational awareness.
The question posed above—when you should accept, when you should avoid, interruptions to your workflow?—is a little misleading. Your job isn’t to build a walled-off green zone of productivity from which you sally forth occasionally to consider extraneous interruptions from the external world. Your situation is more like a kayaker navigating lakeshore currents, moving in the flow of complex systems, the chop and churn of human relationships, and the riptides of AI development.
Your tasks will be interrupted. Your organizational awareness should not be. A rock-climber named John Dill identifies three interrupters of vital attention in dynamic conditions:
ignorance (you have no idea what’s going on in the larger situation)
casualness (you’re too self-confident, taking too many things for granted)
distraction (you stop being present to your work and start making stupid errors)
In contrast, cultivate mindfulness characterized by curiosity, intentness, and mobile attentiveness. Keep in mind the old sign posted in the New York Central Railroad: “Be where you are with all your mind.”1
Big Changes & New Offerings @ The Mode/Switch
This Saturday, Jan 18, look out for Mode/Switch Premium! For $4/month—or what you’d ordinarily pay for 12 whoopee cushions—you’ll get the following:
water bottle sticker:The “currently experiencing digital overwhelm” decal (shown above) is the perfect size to cover the Apple on your Macbook.Severance week-by-week review videos:Watch Season 2 with me as, week by week, we follow Adam Scott & Patricia Arquette through the intensity and humanity and the sometimes insanity of this hit show.video workshop: I’ll walk you through a communication solution to a workplace problem inspired by viewings from Severance.
Readers of Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe will recognize my dependence in the “Story” and “Shift” sections of this week’s newsletter. See especially chapter 5 of their excellent book Managing the Unexpected.