Confrontation seems like the nuclear option so I’d like to avoid that.
In the spirit of incremental improvement, what’s the smallest action that you’d recommend that I can take?
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.