If your place of work heavily relies on Outlook calendars and IM, consider the following:
- Set your IM status to away or busy when you don't want to be disturbed. While a quick question from a colleague may be more appropriate over IM than him stopping by in person, fight your urge to be helpful all the time. Most times the answer can wait. How likely is the question you will be answering be more important than what you are working on if you have explicitly set your status away because you don't want to be disturbed? If it were really a higher priority, the question wouldn't be asked over IM.
- Turn off Outlook sounds/notifications for when you receive new e-mail. We love distractions and being up to date on communications, but reading and responding to e-mails more often than not throw us off our pace. I've heard that it may take up to 15 minutes to be able to get back on track after being "randomized." Which also gives support for the first point above.
- Block off "me"-time in your calendar and find a private area to work. I had a manager who was always the go-to person for so many teams that I was always amazed at how he could still be so productive on his own projects. Turned out that on occasion he would block out two-hour chunks on his calendar and go to the cafeteria or a conference room and work on his laptop there. Sometimes that block of un-interrupted time is necessary and requires more steps to enforce.
- Work-life balance? Block off (and mark private) times that you cannot stay late at work due to prior commitments. If you know ahead of time that your kid's championship game is on a weeknight and your team has a tendency to schedule late meetings, put an out-of-office appointment on your calendar that also considers commute time and stick to your guns about it. The whole point of having access to shared calendars is to know when people are available and give flexibility in scheduling.
Of course there's also making sure your office door (if you're lucky enough to have one) is closed. That's a low-tech solution that works well, as people are less likely to poke their head in if they have to go through the formality of a knock.
And per proper etiquette, respect when a coworker has her IM status set to busy or her calendar says she's not supposed to be there. I still hold a grudge against a former manager (not in my management chain) that didn't understand that the reason there was a calendar reminder popping up was because I had to leave right then and there to catch my bus so I could make it to a rehearsal. While I know better today to ask "Can it wait for tomorrow?", I also expect professionals to also know when to ask "Is now a good time?"
Hope these tips for minimizing distraction and interruptions help! They work wonders for me during crunch time!