One Thing at a Time Archives - understand-culture

Words for Staying With One Thing

auf zwei Hochzeiten tanzen — to dance at two weddings. Duden explains it as wanting to be everywhere. It is often said in the negative: Man kann nicht auf zwei Hochzeiten gleichzeitig tanzen. You cannot dance at two weddings at the same time.

jemandes Kreise stören — to disturb someone’s circles, to disturb a person in their work. The phrase goes back to Archimedes, whose last words are said to have been Störe meine Kreise nicht, do not disturb my circles.

bei der Sache sein — to be with the matter, to keep one’s mind on the task.

Ich bin gerade mittendrin. — I am in the middle of something right now.

Bitte nicht stören — please do not disturb, the sign on the door.

die Stillarbeit — quiet work, a period in which each pupil works alone and in silence.

Three Hours Every Morning

In exile, Thomas Mann kept a fixed working day. Jeden Morgen um neun zieht er sich für drei Stunden zum Schreiben zurück. Every morning at nine he withdrew for three hours to write. After dinner he read the pages of the morning aloud to his wife and family. The Thomas Mann Archive at ETH Zurich runs a long exhibition on his study, Im Schreiben eingerichtet, Set Up for Writing, from 2023 to 2029. It asks how his working day and his family life were arranged around his writing.

Phones Out of the Classroom

Several German states have tightened their rules on smartphones in schools. ZDF reported that Brandenburg, Bremen, Hesse, Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia did so at the start of a new school year, um die Konzentration zu fördern, to support concentration. In March 2025, Hesse announced that it would ban the private use of smartphones, smartwatches and tablets through a change to its school law, starting in the 2025/26 school year. The Hessian education minister, Armin Schwarz, said schools should be places where students can frei von Ablenkung und Ängsten lernen, learn free of distraction and fear.

Focus Friday

On 20 May 2022, SAP introduced meeting-free Fridays for its employees in Germany. On Fridays the company does without conferences, phone calls and video calls. It calls this the Focus Friday. The head of HR, Cawa Younosi, explained that since the pandemic, meetings had become more and more crowded in employees’ calendars. According to the Tagesspiegel, there was too little time um runterzukommen oder wirklich fokussiert an Aufgaben zu arbeiten, to wind down or to work on tasks with real focus. Meetings with customers remained allowed.

Quiet for Concentrated Work

German workplace rules set noise limits according to the kind of work. The technical rule ASR A3.7, published in 2018, defines three categories. Category I is work that needs hohe Konzentration oder hohe Sprachverständlichkeit, high concentration or clear understanding of speech. Examples are scientific and creative work, translating and correcting complex texts, and meetings in conference rooms. For this work, the noise level may not exceed 55 dB(A). General office work falls into category II, which has a higher limit.

Interruptions as a Hazard

German employers must assess the hazards at their workplaces. In 2013 an amendment to the Occupational Safety and Health Act made it explicit that this assessment must also cover psychische Belastungen bei der Arbeit, psychological strain at work. The joint occupational safety strategy of the federal government, the states and the accident insurers lists Störungen/Unterbrechungen, disruptions and interruptions, as one area to examine. A checklist from the employers’ federation BDA names häufige und ungeplante Störungen/Unterbrechungen im normalen Arbeitsablauf, frequent and unplanned disruptions or interruptions in the normal flow of work. It also names the concentrated and simultaneous performance of several different tasks.

Interrupted at Work

German workers report many interruptions. In the federal Stress Report for 2012, almost 60 percent said they had to handle different tasks at the same time. 44 percent said they were interrupted at work, for example by calls and e-mails. In the 2025 stress report of the health insurer Techniker Krankenkasse, 58 percent named interruptions and disruptions as a cause of stress at work. In the trade unions’ DGB-Index Gute Arbeit of 2022, 46 percent said that multitasking had increased the demands on them. The DGB chair, Yasmin Fahimi, called the results ein Alarmsignal, an alarm signal.

Interruptions are common in German workplaces, and the surveys of the health insurer and the trade unions record them as a source of strain.

Avoid Multitasking

The Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, BAuA, publishes a guide for workers called Arbeitsunterbrechungen und Multitasking täglich meistern, Managing Work Interruptions and Multitasking Every Day. Its second edition appeared in 2019. The advice is direct: Vermeiden Sie nach Möglichkeit Multitasking, also die gleichzeitige Bearbeitung mehrerer Aufgaben. Avoid multitasking where possible, that is, working on several tasks at the same time. The guide explains that attention is always directed at only one step of the work. It recommends periods without interruption, agreed with colleagues and managers, for example quiet work behind a closed office door. It also suggests muting the telephone and hiding e-mail notifications.

Decision-Making Process

Germans are process oriented. They think through how a task is best completed. Germans set up work processes which are logical, structured, can be monitored and optimized. Since there is no action without first a decision to act, Germans focus on how decisions are made.

The more complex the decision, the more carefully Germans consider how they make it. Who will be affected by the decision? Who has the final say about the decision? Who has what rights and responsibilities? Germans believe that routine, yet complex, decisions are best made with the help of a decision-making process. And the better the process, the better the decisions made.

The Germans are methodical. In order to maintain Überblick (overview) and Durchblick (throughview) they distinguish carefully between specific steps and their individual requirements within a decision making process. Germans believe that a methodical approach minimizes mistakes.

They also assign a generous time frame to an important decision. In order to move carefully through the process they allow for the repetition of certain steps. Germans believe in moving to the next step in a process only after the preceding step has been completed properly. Patience and thoroughness are critical.

A methodical approach means a well-structured process with sequential action. The clearer the process, the tighter and more logical the sequence of the individual steps, the better coordinated all of the related activities.

Method. Latin methodus, Greek méthodos: The path of analysis, the route to somewhere; a set way to reach insight; a specific way of doing something; the path to a specific goal; based on a plan; well thought through.

German education stresses methodology. University students receive their degrees after demonstrating in a thesis that they have mastered the methodologies current in their field of study. The first part of a thesis goes into great detail about the specific methodology of analysis applied to the subject.

Sequence. Latin sequentia: order of things; to place similar things in line; repetition of a musical motif; shorter pieces of a movie put in a specific order; series of cards in a row.

The Servant on call

The Germans says: “Only servants need be reachable at all times.” It’s a figure of speech many German managers use to signal that they cannot always respond immediately to team member questions, nor can they be reached directly. Team members are often asked – and trained – to only contact their boss if it is truly important.