Comment by quickthrower2
3 years ago
The cost of interrupting someone is killing their train of thought. It is not just a politeness thing.
So like everything it depends on the context.
Interrupting to keep meetings from getting too long is an essential skill. Especially with someone who has grown up with the blab-until-interrupted protocol!
The “flow state” is much more than just a train of thought that can be easily recovered if you have decent memory. Your mood - not so much. In case of meetings it’s probably not that critical but could be more expensive for unsolicited interruptions during say coding/design sessions
That’s a tough one because some people seem to have trouble finding flow state to begin with. I tend to have a fairly easy time but have picked up that few people are as cavalier about it as I am.
That may also be why I was able to walk away and experiment with not doing it. Writers, for instance, seem to be notoriously bad at finding flow state. And if I told one to abandon it mid-stream I’d probably get hurt.
Interruption is sometimes productive though. If the person speaking is not able to stick to one point at a time and instead goes on a monologue expanding multiple topics, others may have critical things to say, but are not able to say because by the time the person stops, the dialogue has moved on to a different topic.
This is very important in say a business setting where decisions need to be made while evaluating all the aspects of the task at hand. If useful information is not discussed because the only way it could’ve happened is by interrupting the speaker, then everyone loses out.
Or if they’re building castles in the clouds, letting them spin not only themselves up but everyone else is not conducive to getting to a reasonable outcome. They’ve built a pretty picture based on bad assumptions, now you get to be the asshole by tearing it apart. It might be kinder to not let them finish.
Some people just talk too much and say little. That also kills the train of thought of everyone else.
The private school culture only works in the artificial setting of a school or another formal setting and is the equivalent of written comment threads, like this one
It's a tradeoff between priorities. Easiest seen in speech vs writing.
Speech is on the speaker's flow primarily. Listeners are expected to keep up not just in vocabulary, but speed among others.
Writing is far friendlier to the reader, being able to set their own pace.
Interruptions allow listeners to shift the balance at the cost of potentially destroying the pace. And sometimes destroying the pace is necessary (e.g. endless discussions).
Is this not just a matter of culture? New Yorkers’ conversations are so compressed that they outright overlap. Any silence is an invitation and anyone with something to say is expected to just say it - to make room for themself. Californians let silence stand longer. It’s hard for me to say one is better than the other.