When I am in the middle of something and people interrupt me with a question or comment, I usually turn to them with this focussed/stern face. When the situation within my team is already stressful, this reaction doesn’t help. The last few days have been extremely stressful at the team & i have been trying to absorb as much of it as I can. I found a neat trick that seems to work for me.

When people come over or interrupt via other forms of communication – I do 3 things:

1) Stop – often I am trying to do 2 things, that doesn’t help. I need to stop.

2) Look – look at the person and give my full attention

3) Smile – about 3-4 secs of them talking, i smile. This diffuses the situation and the conversation can proceed in a lighter manner.

This seems to work pretty well. Experiment subjects have been few – will get back after testing on wider samples 🙂