Got a sec?

“Got a sec?” is one of those phrases you hear all day in IT. I tend to think of it as the drive-by. It’s quick, feels harmless, keeps moving. On its own, it usually is harmless: someone asks a question, gets an answer, and carries on. From the outside, it looks like collaboration working exactly as it should.

The problem isn’t the moment, it’s the pattern.

When it happens once or twice, it doesn’t matter. When it happens all day, work starts to fragment. Instead of one continuous thread, you get lots of small pieces — each one interrupted, each one needing to be picked up again. And every time that happens, there’s a reset. Not just for the person doing the work, but for the work itself. You lose the sequence, the flow, the context that made the next step obvious. So instead of progressing, you spend time rebuilding where you were.

Some work tolerates that. A lot of IT work doesn’t. Anything that depends on reasoning through a problem step by step gets slower; easier to miss things, harder to hold the full picture together. And the more often it happens, the more noticeable it becomes.

There’s another effect that’s less obvious. People learn quickly what works. If walking over to someone gets a faster answer than raising a ticket or following a process, that becomes the default. Formal channels don’t disappear, they just become the place where less urgent work goes. Anything that feels important gets routed through whoever is available.

At that point, you haven’t just got interruptions. You’ve got two systems running at once. One visible, one informal, and only one of them actually used when it matters.

It’s easy to look at that and think it’s a discipline problem — that people need better boundaries, or the team needs more structure. That sounds reasonable, but it misses the point. People don’t interrupt because they lack discipline. They interrupt because it works. If the system rewards interruption, people will use it.

So telling people to stop doesn’t fix much. The behaviour isn’t random, it’s a response. If you want fewer drive-bys, the alternative has to be just as effective: faster responses, clearer paths, less friction. Because if the quickest way to get something done is still “just ask someone”, that’s what people will keep doing.

The issue isn’t the question. It’s the system that makes the question land that way.