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I'm guessing you work in an open plan office like I do. It's hard to have a company-wide expectation that immediate interruptions are off-limits when that's how

• dahart 9y ago
  Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly right, the open floor plan is unfortunately intended to encourage interruption (aside from the obvious advantage of just being cheap.) The last open floor plan I worked in established that the meeting rooms were allowed to be used for engineer quiet time, and that someone in the meeting room was not to be interrupted. It was great for the first couple of months in the building, but eventually the meeting rooms were crowded with meetings and there just weren't enough for engineers to use for focus time very often. Headphones became the only means of staying sane. When I tried office hours, I was actually in shared offices. 4-6 people to a room. It was a game company, and I was supporting artists. The artists were the worst about not respecting office hours, most of the programmers left me alone because they also wanted to be left alone to concentrate. Ultimately I decided I was setting a bad example by trying to establish office hours for myself. The company wasn't that great at planning, and the interruptions I was getting were a symptom of not enough training and formal communication. What was needed was a little more communication, not less. (*But the right kind, of course.)