A person is not always more important than a book

Family morality is happy to declare any live conversation more important than any book, music, work or solitude. A person close to you may well be irreplaceable, but that does not automatically give him the right to all of your attention.

It does not follow that every person should immediately take precedence over a book, music, work or rest.

Close people are also capable of interrupting out of habit, boredom or the assumption that your attention belongs to them by default.

It helps to distinguish:

• an urgent need;
• a rare opportunity;
• ordinary conversation;
• a random distraction.

If a child wants to tell you something important, the series can wait. If a friend rings every day in the middle of your work with no particular reason, it is more useful to set a time to talk.

A connection with the people close to you is maintained by regular attention, not by constant availability.

You can say:

I’ll finish in twenty minutes and come through.

I can’t talk now, but I’ll call this evening.

Is it urgent?

That way a person becomes neither an obstacle nor the supreme priority every time he appears in the doorway.

Art, solitude and concentrated work are also part of a life. Conversation should not displace them under the banner of its own indispensability.

If the people close to you regularly get only the attention left over after all the screens, then the priority has probably already been set — just without discussion.

Working from home makes this especially clear. Someone at a table in his own kitchen looks available, and over the course of the day people come in with a question about dinner, about a parcel, about a funny video — a minute each time. Five such minutes cost not five minutes but everything that was in your head, which then takes another quarter of an hour to rebuild. And not one of those visits was rude and not one took any time: the door simply was not marked, and a closed door only looks closed from the inside.

Marking it is cheaper than explaining your irritation later. “I’m busy until three, after three ask me anything” protects not the work but the relationship: it moves the refusal out of the personal and into the timetable.