Communicating your availability

When people look at you at work, what do they think? Do they think you're always available, it's okay to always walk over to you and interrupt what you are doing? I don't know the answer to that question, I do know you should be thinking about it, and maybe you should go a step further. Start getting proactive about broadcasting your availability. Find some ways to let people know how open you are to being interrupted. Let me give you one interesting example, I saw on a consulting engagement. I found some people who understood this idea and they wanted to find a colorful way to show people in the office where everyone was in terms of time management and urgency. So this what they did. They came up with a color coded system. Every person in the office, outside of their cube, had a little piece of velcro. Everyone would put up, throughout the day, as needed, the color that represented their availability. So, for example, they used red, green and yellow. When you walk up to someone's…