Politics & Power Quote by W. Edwards Deming

Deming’s line lands like a lab report that accidentally reads as an indictment. “Fifty interruptions a day” isn’t just a statistic; it’s a design flaw dressed up as normal life. By quantifying distraction, he pulls the conversation away from moralizing about focus and toward what he cared about most: systems. The worker isn’t weak-willed; the workplace is noisy by construction.

The kicker is the clinical cruelty of “seventy percent have nothing to do with work.” Deming is aiming at management culture that confuses motion with productivity: meetings to schedule other meetings, emails that exist to prove responsiveness, check-ins that paper over unclear priorities. The subtext is especially Deming-esque: most “performance problems” are upstream. If people can’t concentrate, it’s often because organizations incentivize interruption as a form of control and visibility. You can’t measure output cleanly, so you measure presence, availability, and replies.

Context matters. Deming became famous for revolutionizing quality and manufacturing thinking, arguing that variation and waste are systemic, not personal. Read through that lens, interruptions are waste - not the inevitable texture of modern work but an avoidable cost imposed by process failure. The quote also anticipates a very contemporary pathology: knowledge work environments that treat communication as the job itself.

His intent is quietly radical: stop blaming workers, start redesigning work. Cut interruptions and you don’t just “boost productivity”; you restore dignity, autonomy, and the possibility of doing one thing well enough to make it worth doing.