You can totally crash manager flow. I wouldn't recommend doing this on purpose, but if you say something that forces the whole room to stop and consider, you c

You can totally crash manager flow. I wouldn't recommend doing this on purpose, but if you say something that forces the whole room to stop and consider, you can often break the conversational flow and leave a meeting of managers dead in the water. You can also do something that wipes an individual manager's mental cache and they'll spend days trying to remember what everyone is up to and what's happening. I think your final sentence is close, but I'd rephrase it: for managers, those disruptions and conversations in your schedule are them dealing with things that require intense concentration. I think most of them understand what disruption feels like, they just don't associate sitting at the computer typing with that focus because it's not the mechanics of their role -- their focus manifests differently. My managers only rudely interrupt me when they, themselves, are clearly still processing something their boss said to them and they need my input to unblock that process. Or some kind of thing I need to do now, again to unblock whatever they have going on.