Kako smanjiti prekide u malom poduzeću

In most small businesses, the owner or manager is interrupted constantly.

Someone needs a price confirmed. Someone needs to know where a file is. Someone needs approval for something that should have been approved already. The phone rings, the Slack pings, someone walks into the office with “just a quick question.”

Each interruption seems small. Two minutes here, five minutes there.

But interruptions aren’t measured in minutes. They’re measured in context switches. And context switches are expensive.

What’s Actually Happening

Every interruption breaks a thread. If you were thinking about next quarter’s budget, you’re now thinking about whether to approve a vendor invoice. When the interruption ends, you don’t just resume — you have to reload. Remember where you were. What you were considering. What decision you were working toward.

Research suggests it takes 15-25 minutes to fully return to a complex task after an interruption. Most people in small businesses never get 25 uninterrupted minutes.

So they operate in permanent shallow mode. Never quite focused. Never quite deep in anything. Always a little behind on the thinking work because the reactive work never stops.

But here’s the thing: most interruptions aren’t random. They follow patterns. The same questions come up repeatedly. The same decisions get escalated. The same approvals get requested.

Interruptions are a symptom. They indicate where defaults are missing and where ownership is unclear.

Why “Respect Focus Time” Doesn’t Work

The common advice is to set boundaries. Block off focus time on your calendar. Tell people not to interrupt unless it’s urgent. Close your door. Turn off notifications.

This helps at the margins, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

People don’t interrupt you because they want to disrupt your focus. They interrupt because they need an answer to do their job. If the answer isn’t encoded anywhere, they have to ask. Telling them not to ask doesn’t give them the answer — it just makes them hesitate before asking anyway.

The interruption isn’t the problem. The missing answer is the problem.

Encode Answers, Not Boundaries

The sustainable way to reduce interruptions is to encode answers so questions don’t arise in the first place.

Price questions? Create a pricing matrix that covers 90% of cases. Make it easy to find. Train people to check it first.

Approval requests? Define thresholds. Under a certain amount or within certain parameters, approval is automatic. Only exceptions escalate.

Where is the file? Consistent folder structure. Naming conventions. One place things live, not three possible places.

How do we handle X situation? Write it down. Not a 20-page manual — just a short answer to the actual question people keep asking.

Each encoded answer removes a category of interruption forever. Not through discipline or boundaries, but by making the answer available without asking.

The Pattern Behind This

When I look at businesses with fewer interruptions, they share a pattern:

Defaults are documented. The standard way of doing things is written somewhere accessible. Not everything — just the recurring stuff.

Ownership is clear. People know who decides what. They don’t have to guess who to ask.

Exceptions are explicit. The boundary between “handle this yourself” and “escalate this” is defined, not intuited.

Information has a home. Things live in predictable places. Finding something doesn’t require asking someone.

None of this is complicated. But it requires someone to sit down and encode what’s currently in their head.

The Uncomfortable Part

Most people in leadership positions are reluctant to encode answers because it feels slow. Writing down the pricing logic takes 30 minutes. Just answering the question takes 2 minutes.

But you’re not answering the question once. You’re answering it weekly. Monthly. Every time someone new joins.

The 30-minute investment pays off the first month.

The other reluctance: encoding answers means committing to them. Some owners prefer keeping decisions in their head because it preserves flexibility. They can change their mind without updating anything.

But this flexibility has a cost. It means every decision goes through you. It means you can never fully step back. It means the business can’t run without your constant availability.

What This Means

Reducing interruptions isn’t about demanding respect for your time. It’s about making the information available so people don’t need to interrupt.

The goal isn’t quiet. It’s autonomy. People who can get answers without asking don’t interrupt — not because they’re being polite, but because they don’t need to.

Start with the last five interruptions. Write down what people asked. Then encode the answers somewhere findable.

Do this consistently and the interruptions reduce themselves. Not through discipline, but through design.

This connects to a deeper question about availability: The Cost of Always Being Available (coming soon).