While you can't necessarily stop your colleagues from interrupting you, you can tell your tools not to. Start with email notifiers. It's nearly impossible for people to not notice email notifiers when they appear on your screen or make a sound. I created a 30 second video demo to show you how to turn off email notifiers in Outlook, which are set to alert you by default. DON'T WORRY -- email will still pour into your Inbox. It just means you won't get notified by Outlook every time a new email lands.

Watch Outlook Demo

Nearly every email program has some kind of notify feature you can turn off. In Lotus Notes, it's under Tools>Preferences>User Preferences>Mail. Look for the When New Mail Arrives area to uncheck all of the ways it wants to notify you.


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