 I'm Nicole Baumgart. I'm an infrastructure engineer at Blinker. This is my first time giving a tech speech of any kind, so you have to be really nice to me. So I thought to myself, five minutes, 20 slides, I can totally get this, right? No. It took me hours. I thought I was losing my beeping. I did it. I caught myself. Mind. And then I realized I have felt this way so many times in the last seven and a half years of being in an operational role. Raise your hand if you're in an operational role of any kind. Yeah, pretty much everybody in the room. We all know what that's like, right? You work, you work, you work, you end your day and you're like, shit, I didn't do anything. What did I get done? Our priorities are constantly changing no matter how much we plan our sprints out, right? We're still constantly learning, right? On top of everything else, we have to keep up with technology. Studies have actually shown that in a seven-day work week, people actually get three days of work done and that's it. I have to think that the number one cause of that are interruptions, right? How many times a day do you get interrupted? Studies have shown that an average person, not even in an operational role, gets interrupted every three minutes and five seconds out of their day. Not only that, it takes an average person 23 minutes and 15 seconds just to get back to the task that they were doing before they were interrupted. Does everyone feel like those are true for you? Yeah? Yeah, I like the interaction. Three minutes and five seconds. So what do you do when you're interrupted that much? Where do you go? Do you work in the bathroom? Do you go home and work? That is its own interruptions. Do you work on the weekends or before everyone comes in the office? Cause that's not a sustainable work rate either. So you have to look at the Institute of Psychology. What are these interruptions doing? Will data actually suggest that by working fast, sorry, when you compensate for interruptions by working faster, this comes at a price. You experience more stress, your higher frustration levels, and you have to feel way more time pressure and effort. Okay, so then I thought to myself, all right, when do I feel like I'm actually in control of my day? Well, it's when I'm driving a car and I'm not just pimping blinker right now, okay? Literally, I finally have control over where I'm going, what I'm doing, and most of the time, the speed I'm even getting there. So to be able to control our interruptions, we first have to define them. I like to define them in two ways, the dogs and the demons, okay? The dog interruptors, they seem like they're out of your control. They happen to you, they have good intentions. The demon interruptors are a little bit more easier to identify. They're the demons in your head. Let me give you an example of a dog interruptor. We all have these people in our office, we're working, our headphones are on, and they come up to you, hey, Nicole, do you have a second, do you have a second? It's really quick, you can fix it fast. I like to call those the labradors, right? They're really nice, they have good intentions, but they're always there at the wrong moment. Let me give you another example of a dog interruptor. I like to call these the border collies. They're normally in the form of manager, sorry. They heard up all the developers for a 30 minute planning meaning that turns into an hour and a half, and your day is gone, right? Let me give you an example of a demon. This one's easy, this one's mine, worry. The moment I start to worry about a deadline, my focus is shot. I just interrupted my entire process for the day. Demon interruptors are different for everybody. They come in forms of time management, worry and emotions. And if you are sleeping, I got your attention now. This is the demonic dog. This is what happens when you have two at the same time. I've lost focus, I'm frustrated with myself and the labrador comes up. And what do I want to do? Snap, right? It's so frustrating. So let's go back to the labrador. They don't know what they're doing. They don't know that they're frustrating you. And what do we normally say? No, not right now. Instead, what we should be saying is, hey, now's not a good time, send me an email, I'll get back to you in an hour. We're training the labrador, right? We're training the labrador on what form of communication we want them to have with us. We're setting a time expectation. And when we follow up with them, we're building trust. This isn't always true. I was supposed to say that. The other thing you have to do is ask questions, right? If the border collie is hurting you around, ask questions. Can we shorten this meeting? Can we move this meeting to make it better for everybody else? And last but not least, exercise the demons. This one's actually said easiest, but it's the hardest to do. You need to listen to yourself. If you're banging your head against a desk three times in a row, you shouldn't be doing what you're doing. Stand up, take a break. So beer pong is something I suck at. And I also suck at implementing those things I just said, as we all do. It takes a lot of practice. You really need to train those labradors. You need to communicate the medium that you want them to have with you so those interruptions stop. All of us have had burnout, right? When operational role burnout is probably one of the most common things we see. To prevent that, we have to regain our sanity. And to do that, you need to control the interruptors around you. So in the words of Winston Churchill, don't interrupt me while I'm interrupting.