I had ignored three calls, silenced notifications, and even put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on my home office door. Yet somehow, I still found myself dealing with seven interruptions before noon. Does this sound like your typical workday? For women entrepreneurs balancing business growth with family responsibilities, interruptions aren’t just occasional annoyances—they’re a constant battle that threatens our productivity strategies and mental well-being. Today, I’m tackling this universal struggle head-on.
In this continuation of my interruption management series, I’m moving beyond prevention to resilience, sharing the exact protocol that has helped many other women entrepreneurs maintain productivity despite the chaos. You’ll learn my revolutionary three-step approach that transforms how you respond to interruptions mentally and physically, allowing you to process disruptions efficiently and return to deep work with minimal recovery time—a skill that could literally save you hours each week.
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In this episode, we cover:
- The two essential elements to managing interruptions: your external reaction and your internal mindset
- A powerful three-step protocol to effectively handle any interruption
- How normalizing, accepting, and reassuring yourself creates the foundation for calm responses
- Practical techniques to reduce the time and effort spent dealing with disruptions
- The “box it up” method to prevent rumination and quickly refocus on your work
- Why setting boundaries around interruptions is critical for sustained productivity
- A simple technique to make it easier to pick up your work exactly where you left off
- How to distinguish between emergency interruptions and those that can wait
Remember when you used to think interruptions were just part of life as a woman entrepreneur? After implementing this three-step protocol, my clients have reclaimed hours of focused work time each week and dramatically reduced their stress levels. What’s your biggest interruption challenge right now, and which strategy from today’s episode will you try first?
If you’re ready to stop letting interruptions control your day and start taking back your productivity, join me in the Messy Kitchen Workshop Series where I’ll personally coach you through your specific interruption challenges—click the link below to secure your spot!
Links & Mentioned Resources
Ep 157 “Your Focus Is Gold: Stop Letting Interruptions Steal It”
Ep. 53, “The Box It Up” Method
Time Masters
Connect with Kirsty:
More about The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
The podcast to help you, as an ambitious high-achieving Type-A woman, master work-life balance as a business owner.
Join Kirsty Knight each week, so she can help you create the level of success you truly desire, in a business that you love, without needing to sacrifice time for yourself, your health, your family, and your enjoyment of life outside of your business. Without hustling, without working yourself into the ground, and without burning out.
Kirsty will be sharing lessons from her own business journey, business strategies, time management and productivity hacks, and the psychology you need to understand – to help you go from overworking and overwhelmed, to mastering your time and productivity, so you can be working less, and earning more.
If you are trying to build or scale your business, but find yourself struggling with overwhelm, self-sabotage, procrastination, distractions, perfectionism, people-pleasing, hustling, overworking and always thinking “there just aren’t enough hours in the day”, this podcast is for you.
You CAN have it all. And she’s going to show you how.
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of the The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
Good morning lovelies, so today we are talking about the second part of the strategy for managing interruptions – which is about mitigating the impact of the interruptions that you still have. So last week we talked about the first part of the Interruption Protocol which was to attempt to minimise the number, type and frequency of the interruptions. This week, we are talking about part 2 – which is how to mitigate/reduce the impact of the interruptions you can’t eliminate completely.
Because we cannot eliminate all interruptions for every single day that you work on your business and it’s unreasonable to expect that you can. Impossible even.
Like we’ve previously discussed – As a woman, in a well connected society these days, impossible.
But also, we cannot control other people as much as we might like to think we can. So we can make requests of other people to not disturb us. We can set boundaries and communicate them. And people can still interrupt us.
And there will always be an element of the unexpected to deal with. Where we haven’t foreseen the interruption and we just have to manage it in the moment.
So how can we mitigate the impact if that happens?
Well, I want you to consider that there are two elements to it.
There’s your external reaction to the interruption – how you handle the interruption. How you respond. What you physically do. Or say. So that you can get back to work as quickly as possible. Which like I’ve already said requires that you feel some discomfort to do sometimes.
And then there’s what goes on inside your mind afterwards. Which has the potential to help ease you straight back into your work, or which has the potential to make it as hard as possible to focus back on your work.
So let’s talk about the first piece.
So when you get interrupted for whatever reason, you actually have quite a few options available to you.
You can try to ignore the interruption.
You can respond immediately to it.
You can take a second to make sure you are leaving your work at a reasonable place to pick back up from, before turning your attention to the interruption.
You can assess what the interruption requires from you, decide it can wait, communicate that if needed and go back to your work.
You can assess what the interruption requires from you and decide to deal with it there and then – but take an age with it.
You can decide to deal with it there and then, but aim to get it done as quickly as possible. And then go back to your work.
You can go back on what you said you would do – your boundary, and give in to whatever the person wants.
Or you can decide to uphold your boundary, say no, and go back to work.
Or you can write off the rest of the day and not bother even attempting to get back to work.
Now, there’s no ONE right or wrong answer here.
But the protocol I teach that I want you to aim for, really rests on the following ideas.
That we can stay calm in all interruptions. That they are no big deal. That we know which ones to turn our attention to and which ones to deal with later. That we can handle them quickly and efficiently. We can uphold our boundaries no matter how uncomfortable that may be. And we can get back to work and refocus again easily.
Which leads us to the second element – which is managing our mind after the interruption.
Because when we go back to our work, we can either – go back to work and seethe about it. And spend the entire rest of the time attempting to work whilst our brains are furiously spitting about having been interrupted again and whatever happened in the interruption.
Or we can go back to work, and direct our focus back on what we were doing before we were interrupted. We can choose to not spend any more time and energy spinning about how annoying the interruption was, or whatever happened in it. We can choose to not engage with thoughts that aren’t helpful for us.
We literally have the power to do that.
And as you can imagine, dealing with important interruptions calmly, and quickly and efficiently, and then turning our attention back to work as soon as we can, and then not engaging with any brain chatter about the interruption whilst we are back working – is an effective way to mitigate the impact from the interruption.
Versus feeling the need to handle every interruption, even when it’s not important. Versus doing it slowly. Versus getting mad about having been interrupted.
Those situations are going to amplify the impact, rather than reduce it.
So to remember what to do in the moment, these are the three steps to effectively mitigate the impact of the interruptions you can’t eliminate.
1 – Is to regulate. So we are going to aim to stay cool, calm and collected. So we regulate our nervous system so we don’t get stressed by the fact we are being interrupted. To do this we want to normalise, accept, and reassure. NAR – So normalise – you can simply take a nice deep breath as soon as you realise you are being interrupted, and remind yourself interruptions are normal. Even the unexpected ones. Even the unwanted ones. They are normal. Accept – accept that it is what it is – there is an interruption to potentially deal with. And then reassure. Reassure ourselves that we can handle it quickly and efficiently and get back to work without any problem.
2 – Is to deal with it. Deal with the interruption in the quickest and most efficient way possible. Aim to reduce the time and effort spent on it. If it doesn’t need to be handled right now – then communicate that you will deal with it later.
3 – Get back to work. Pick right up where you left off. And don’t engage with your brain if it starts offering rumination or frustrations about the interruption. Use the “box it up” method I shared in Episode 153 – to give your brain permission to let it go for the moment, whilst you focus on getting your work done.
And then afterwards, I would consider if it would have been possible to minimise the interruption in the first place – and if it’s likely to come up again, how I could strategise so it doesn’t.
The only other thing I would add is that if I could make it easier for myself to pick work up where I left off – e.g. make a note of my train of thought, or what I was about to write or say, then I would do that before handling the interruption.
Unless it was an emergency interruption. So if you do a brief scan of what the interruption is – and you have to stop what you are doing immediately to sort it out. Think medical issue. Think siblings in the middle of a fist fight needing you to break it up. If it’s an emergency – you stay cool, but deal with it immediately.
And where it doesn’t make sense for you to go back to work – fine. But you want to know what those conditions would be ahead of time – so you aren’t just listening to your brain justifying that there’s no point in going back to work because you’ll only get interrupted again, or you only have half an hour.
Just remember that dealing with the interruption – might be you honouring the boundary that you set up for your interrupting family member. It doesn’t necessarily mean answering the door and letting them in to have a cup of tea even though you told them not to come when you were trying to minimise the interruption. Dealing with the interruption might be you saying “oh no, you came in these hours, I’m afraid I’m working, like I said I’d be – so I can’t offer you a cup of tea right now, so sorry, I’m free at the weekend though”.
But fingers crossed, after doing the work to attempt to minimise your interruptions significantly, you might be pleasantly surprised that you get interrupted way less so maybe you won’t have to do the challenging work of honouring that boundary with your mother-in-law after all.
So to summarise we want to take an active approach to minimising the number of interruptions we face during the hours we want to be working on our business. So to do this, we want to first
- Observe/become aware of who’s typically interrupting, what for, when and why – ok, The 4 W’s.
- We then want to Strategise – How can we minimise this? Reduce the chance of it happening, reduce the potential impact? And what obstacles are in the way to us implementing this – what gnarly emotions are we going to have to be willing to feel to set up that boundary and communicate it? My client did a fabulous job of overcoming the discomfort to tell a friendly colleague at a co-working space that she needed to not be interrupted during her focused work times. So if she can do it, so can you.
- And then step 3 is to Overcome. Overcome the obstacles, the fear, the awkwardness, the resistance, the challenges you face in implementing the strategy. So you can test it out. Test out the strategy. And of course, once we try anything we always want to be evaluating. To see what worked, what didn’t and what you are going to try next time.
And then for the interruptions we can’t foresee or we can’t fully stop happening, no matter how hard we try, we want to try to mitigate the impact, reduce the impact. So to do this we want to first
- Regulate our nervous system (stay cool, normalise it, accept it, reassure ourselves – this is a process, and we can get back to work and get a decent amount done, even with interruptions)
- Then we want to handle it in the shortest way possible (aim to reduce time and effort spent on it, reschedule it, uphold the boundaries we put in place
- And then we want to Box up the interruption and any fall out we are going to feel afterwards from it, and then Pick up where you left off – no frustrating on how you can’t get anything done with being interrupted, no wondering what your sister was calling about, no ruminating on why your mother-in-law came round even when you explicitly asked her not to. Just focusing on the work in front of you.
Try it out, and if you need further support to implement, make sure you are signed up to come to The Messy Kitchen Workshop series, where I will be doing a workshop on handling interruptions. The link will be in the show notes.
That’s it for this week peeps. Have a good one. Til next time.
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