Hey all.
I need some advice on how to deal with the adhoc vs planned work. There are emails, tickets and verbal interruptions that need my attention. Additionally there is an incrr sing amount of meetings I need to attend. At the same time I want to focus on the development of the infrastructure for the planned work. I notice that all the interruptions are detrimental to both the planned and the adhoc work.
The fact that I have to switch my attention all the time and can’t just focus starts to frustrate me. It also has to do with my adhd. I cant utilize my hyperfocus to finish the planned work, instead it stimulates the attention switching side of my adhd and cant get into the problem. I just notice I am not as effective as I was before I got this workload.
Do you people recognize this struggle? How do you deal with this?
Make a list of your priorities, do them in order, what doesn’t get done doesn’t get done don’t worry about it. That’s why you have a priority list. As long as you communicate to stakeholders and get agreement on the priority order, then nobody has room to argue.
Schedule a block of time per day where you can’t be interrupted so you can get your hyperfocus in. Don’t eat into your personal time for this focus time.
What’s important is not always urgent, and what’s urgent is not always important.
Answering the phone is urgent, it’s ringing right now, but when you answer it it’s a telemarketer - it’s not important. A lot of life is like this.
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Without context, to me it seems like you need a new colleague hired who can take some of the random work off your shoulders. This way you can be present in the oh so important meetings and focus on developing the infra.
Let me pinshit about “adhoc”, a latin word which most people think of as meaning something like “spontaneous”. That’s wrong! Ad (to) hoc (this) means “in this regard”. If someone asks you a specific question, you could answer “adhoc i have no idea” or “i don’t know anything adhoc”. There’s no such thing as “adhoc work”.
Thanks, however language by its very nature is dynamic and changing. If enough people use adhoc in this way it will mean spontaneous ;-).
Care to try and answer my question?
The implication is to say “I’m busy right now, let me get back to you”.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
I guess, a very important skill is to say no. It’s ok to be unavailable to finish a task.
A meeting without an agenda, from my experience, lacks focus and consequently often results. Sometimes asynchronous communication is enough… Personally, i try to concentrate meetings to specific days of the week, so that i have two, three days a week without major interruptions.Regarding operations, i like to cite: “unplanned work is death to all other types of work, such as planned, or projects”
We do have an operation center, which routes events, incidents, information coming from all types of ingress(events, email, calls, incident tickets) to specific support groups.
Support groups, as does mine, have a so called “dispatcher” role. Someone’s main task for the week is to acknowledge incoming events, and to try to solve most (small) tasks themselves - to keep everyone’s back free; to concentrate unplanned work of the whole group.
