The Work Call That Mattered
I want to return to the work call interruption because I described it briefly and it deserves more space than I gave it.
The call was a standing biweekly with three stakeholders on a project I had been coordinating for seven months. One of the stakeholders, a director named Carl I had mentioned to Patricia only in passing, had a habit of using the first three minutes of any call to cover news that was not on the agenda, which sounds inefficient and was, but also meant that anything important at a stakeholder level was likely to surface in those three minutes.
Patricia knocked on my office door two minutes into the call and opened it and said: Maya, do you know where Daniel keeps his —
I held up my hand. Palm out, the universal please stop.
She stopped.
I pointed at my headset, then at the door. She closed it.
The director on the call was mid-sentence about a budget reallocation that affected my project’s Q4 timeline. I had missed approximately thirty words of it. I pieced together the rest from context and asked a clarifying question at the end of his point that I believe covered the gap, but I spent the remaining forty-five minutes of the call with a background layer of attention devoted to whether I had actually understood the budget implication, rather than fully present to the rest of the agenda.
The budget implication turned out to be minor. Nothing was lost. But the cost of the interruption was not zero: it was the forty-five-minute split-attention cost, which is not the same as losing a deal or missing a deadline, but is not nothing either.