The Rule of St. Benedict is a sixth-century document that, among other things, tells you when to wake up. It is also one of the better books I know on the management of interruption.
A monk under the Rule prays seven times a day. Vigils, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline — yes, that is eight; the count varies. The point is that the day is broken. Whatever the monk is doing — copying a manuscript, working in the kitchen, walking the cloister — he stops. He goes to the chapel. He prays the office. Then he goes back.
This is not, in the modern sense, a productivity hack. The interruptions are the point.
On-call as a rule of life
I am thinking about all this because I am on-call this week. Pages come in at any hour, in any state of preparation. They do not respect my flow. They do not respect my dinner. They do not, in fact, respect anything.
The temptation, when on-call, is to treat the pages as the enemy. As things stealing from the real work. The Benedictine reframe — and it is a reframe — is that the interruptions are the work. You are not a person writing code who is occasionally interrupted by alerts. You are a person whose job, this week, is to attend to alerts.
The first degree of humility, then, is that a man always have the fear of God before his eyes.
Not anxious fear. Reverent attention. Show up for the page. Read the dashboard like a psalm. Trust that the interruptions, taken together, are themselves a kind of office.