Protecting attention is a design problem

If interruption is the outcome, then attention isn’t a personal problem, it’s a system problem. And system problems don’t get solved by telling people to try harder.

A lot of attempts to fix this focus on the surface. Focus time, team agreements, “try not to interrupt between X and Y.” All reasonable. None of them really address the cause. Because the real issue is this: informal paths have become more effective than formal ones. If walking up to someone works better than raising a ticket, people will walk up. That’s not bad behaviour, that’s a working system, just not the one you intended.

So the fix isn’t better discipline. It’s changing what the informal path costs.

One thing that worked well in a previous team was very simple. If someone came over with a “quick question”, we’d open a ticket there and then, while they stood there, before answering it. Not to be difficult, just to make the work visible. If anyone questioned it, the explanation was straightforward: we’re measured on tickets, and if work happens without one, it looks like we’re doing less than we are. That was usually enough. People weren’t trying to avoid the process, they just didn’t realise they were bypassing it.

A few things happened as a result. The interaction took slightly longer, which meant people only bypassed the queue when it actually mattered. Because the team was respected, most people were happy to follow the process once they understood it wasn’t arbitrary. And for the person interrupted, the interaction had a clear start and end point, which made it easier to get back to what they were doing. The interruption didn’t disappear, but it stopped being shapeless.

The broader point is this: formal channels need to be worth using. If they’re slower, less reliable, or harder to navigate than just asking someone, people will route around them, every time. Fixing that isn’t a policy exercise. It’s finding where the informal path is winning, and making the formal one competitive.

Attention matters because it’s what everything else depends on. You can’t reason properly without it, solve complex problems without it, or make good decisions without it. If the environment keeps fragmenting it, you don’t just lose time, you lose quality.

Protecting attention isn’t about comfort. It’s about making sure people can actually think. And that’s not something you push down to teams, it sits with how the system is designed, which means it sits with leadership.