I was talking to a manager of IT systems in a financial organization, and she told me of an impressive step she’d taken to improve effectiveness. She had a group of programmers working for her, and they were suffering – as do we all – from frequent interruptions. So she removed the (landline) telephones from their rooms! She also made it known that these people were not to be interrupted by other means, and thereby allowed them to do what they were there for – write code.

The results were very evident: efficiency in this team had visibly improved relative to earlier times. This is not surprising: we know that interruptions can wreak havoc on any knowledge worker’s effectiveness, but we also know that this is especially harmful to coders, because they take 15-30 minutes just to get in “the flow”. Interrupting them with ringing phones even 2-3 times an hour can keep them in “Continuous partial attention” full-time!

So, no surprise in the outcome – but definite surprise that this manager had the rare wisdom (and guts) to enforce this beneficial no-phone regime on her team!