- Direct feedback to the manager about your needing space to work and their disruptive behavior.
- Same feedback to their manager.
- Look for new jobs.
There’s no way to solve this that avoids direct feedback and the possibility of confrontation.
In the spirit of incremental improvement, what’s the smallest action that you’d recommend that I can take?
Many different ways of dealing with it,
- from not responding at all (I do this often when people just ”ping” without stating their business),
- to asking what the matter is and if its urgent otherwise lets discuss it (a good while) later when I have time (I do this often too, my job is programming and requires focus time)
- to just saying that you are busy right now
Just a few ideas, find the guts to experiment and learn
I actually rarely bring up these kind of issues with managers, I find its mostly about signaling and breaking the loop that annoying people thrive on. Learn to subtly draw a line, repeatedly if you must, without being confrontational
If you say "hey, I'm the middle of working on X. Can't this wait until we have our 1:1?" do you think that wouldn't be well received?
Also, maybe give them some information on how expensive context switching is.