Structuring my communication with office hours

Running a small development agency, one my my tasks is being available for my customers — past, present and future ones — to field questions, give support and discuss any future development efforts. That happens over the phone, per email or with our larger or long-time customers using Slack.

I quite like that part of the job. If I were working at a larger company, I wouldn’t mind having the role of support engineer. It’s the right combination of personal contact and building relationships, as well as finding efficient and quick solutions for problems, with and without using code.

However, doing that isn’t my full-time job at the moment. I also actually work on some of these development projects in a programming capacity. That means needing chunks of uninterrupted time, preferably at least an hour or two, to sink my teeth into these tasks and make real progress. I’ve been struggling a bit with combining these two facets of my work.

It hasn’t been a large problem as of yet, but it’s an ongoing annoyance. I want to do the best work I can, both as a developer building applications, but also as a project manager offering the best possible support for our customers.

Along the way, I’ve tried multiple things to ease this process. One of those things was keeping a day per week free for any small support jobs that came up. That resulted in some issues of its own, however: some small jobs would have to wait almost a whole week to be completed, even though they…