Stupid Ideas Of The Past: The Open Door

I was going to write today about how un-productive it is to be constantly accessible by implementing an “open door policy”. Then I saw this thread on Davis Allen’s Getting Things Done board and realized that there are actually various kinds of open doors.

There is the door to your office or any other physical access to you, sitting at your desk. There is mail and mail notifiers, there are phones and – even worse – your Blackberry. And there is snail mail, memos and faxes being delivered to your physical inbox.

So, what’s wrong here? There is clearly nothing wrong with mails and phone calls and people dropping by your place. What is wrong, though, is the way how these intrusions keep you from doing what you intent to do at this point in time. You are getting de-focused and distracted. You allow others to change your agenda and your priorities.

Take a look at this scenario: You are sitting at your desk, working on a quarterly report that is due within hours. Your door is open and somebody from your staff pops in with a quick question. Sounds familiar? Sure does. Now, what is really happening here? First of all, those quick questions usually are minor problems that somebody other than you should be responsible to solve. But that might take time, effort and creativity. On the other hand, it is so easy to just pass the problem on to you. In a situation like that, 80 % of all managers would probably drop whatever they are currently doing and eagerly look into the problem because it makes them feel good, needed and important.

In essence, this means that these managers allow their staff to change their priorities in a split second, without even thinking about it, just because they have implemented an “open door policy”. If you are like that, how can you possibly get things done? You can not.

How can you avoid being constantly moved away from your priorities? It is actually quite easy, but it does require you to be aware of the situation and to be sensitive, because there might be real emergencies that need immediate attention and you want to be accessible for your staff, but just not at any time.

In the case of the open door, I have changed it to “this door is open when open and closed when closed”. So if you need to work on that report, close your door and let people know that they better have a very good reason to open it. It works really well for me, but requires some retraining of staff.

How about mail? I check my Lotus Notes inbox three times a day and use no mail notifier that would distract me. There is very rarely a mail message that can not wait for two or three hours. The rule for my physical inbox is that I empty it once within 24 hours, no matter what. Just make sure that the people you work with know and understand these rules and adopt to them. If you do, you set your agenda and your priorities and hardly anybody else. (Rule does not apply to my wife and my boss, of course.)

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