An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

The second most effective time thief that I’ve found is ad hoc interruptions: getting pinged on HipChat or Slack, taps on the shoulder, alerts from your on-call system, high-volume email lists, and so on. The strategy here is to funnel interruptions into an increasingly small area, and then automate that area as much as possible. Ask people to file tickets, create chatbots that automate filing tickets, create a service cookbook, and so on. With that setup in place, create a rotation for people who are available to answer questions, and train your team not to answer other forms of interruptions. This is remarkably uncomfortable because we want to be helpful humans, but it becomes necessary as the number of interruptions climbs higher.