Distractions and Focus

Distractions and Focused Time

Overall issue: It's been many a retro where distractions have come up as a huge issue, potential blocker and overall detractor from being able to focus.
We've noticed an increasing number of distractions through slack, email, customer deadlines, blocked stories (not enough information going into it), meetings, walkups (either a result of us ignoring slack and someone 'needing' a response or our placement on the bathroom highway), support questions and just the typical noise from the office as we grow in people.

Overall Symptom: No one (generalizing a bit here) on Solutions feels confident that they will get more than 30-40 minutes of uninterrupted focus time at any point throughout the work day.

Almost all of us wear headphones now for the majority of the day. 
It was the nicest alternative to putting a sign up that says "Fuck off, I'm working" that we could think of, and it has allowed us to squeeze out those 30 minutes here and there. 
It's not ideal as a team or sustainable long-term as we try to incorporate more technical initiatives (Solutions Roadmap) while balancing delivery.
I don't think that any one type of distraction is the most at fault, its just an influx of all of them at once.

Whether intentional or just inevitable, we effectively act as the first line of defense for much of the product team, and often act as Tier 3 support. This allows other team to have more structured focus time and work through their backlogs.
The CSMs rely on us to help fill in product (or management of customers) gaps, typically within a small window of time.
The Sales team relies on us to provide proof-of-concept solutions for product gaps or features to come, again in a small window of time.
Often, the work requires a lot of domain knowledge and business context. We are happy to do it, and find that knowledge very valuable, but it can be mentally taxing and lead to crossed-wires as the day goes on.

Our work may be mostly ad-hoc and somewhat disjointed from one to the next, but the complexity level is typically high.

We are expected (and expect out of ourselves) A+ work, but can barely manage C effort (through time spent) and focus. With less focus we are likely to make mistakes.

We work hard and fast, but know that we should revisit the work down at some point in the future. Unfortunately that's something we almost never have time to do.

We've talked a fair amount about solutions to distractions, and have tried things like shutting off slack completely, ignoring emails and wearing headphones. But, it makes us feel disjointed from what's going on, and we still aren't getting enough time to focus.
It's possible that moving where we sit as a team could help, but that would also mean that some other team would have to bite the bullet and we don't really feel comfortable asking another team to do that.
Plus, we want to balance technical initiatives and longer projects as a stable part of our workflow.

We've even noticed an uptick in productivity when many of us have been sick and have had to work from home. Puking can't stop this machine!

So, we want to open the discussion with a request for a solutions 10-20% work-from-where-you-are-comfortable. I find coffee shops to be a suitable alternative, but some feel they are just as disruptive and busy and would prefer a more quiet environment.
Each person would be able to pick an environment they are most comfortable with and confident they can focus and get in-depth work accomplished.
It would be set up as a rolling schedule, so there would always be someone in the office to field immediate concerns (Nathan and I wouldn't take the same day), but whomever was working from somewhere else would work on something that required more focus and less interruption.
As a bonus, we should finally be able to get back to push ourselves to learn new things and allow ourselves to be creative in how we can solve it. Right now, we are focused on deadlines.

We would still be available via slack and email, but the understanding would be for that person to buckle down and Get. Shit. Done.

If we aren't able to force ourselves into focused work, I think that in 3+ months we will still be stuck in 100% deliverability/interruption/protect-the-quarterback mode.
As we train up custom view knowledge and hire some implementation team engineers, we will absolutely need focused time to build and scope the projects required to make that team successful and transition responsibility of delivery.
All in all we just want to open up the discussion and figure out a plan for moving forward.