Article Directory

Welcome to our Article Directory. Please feel free to submit your own articles.

Home Page   Articles   Submit Article  

Common Distractions at Work

by Shelly Langerman

It's easy to blame workers for their level of distraction on the job. While they can be obviously responsible for their own personal work and productivity, it's simply fair to assess if there is any various contributing influences (meaning besides themselves). Numerous studies demonstrate that business office distractions can be ridiculously excessive, and subsequently costly. The standard worker is usually distracted a lot more than 2 hours daily, which costs businesses approximately $600 billion every year (As i told you that it was a large expense). This commonly recognized problem was a conversational distraction, which of course is some sort of a two-way lane. However, many employees are pulled into conversations they definitely aren't planning to partake in. It's challenging to block out clashes, loud sales guys, and additionally general distracting co-workers.

Surprisingly, there is usually another grievance commonly cited- that's feeling aggravated from interruptions and needless meetings. Case in point: examine a recent description with the modern workplace by Jason Fried of 37 Signals:

"What happens is, is that you show up at work and you sit down and you don't just immediately begin working, like you have to roll into work. You have to sort of get into a zone, just like you don't just go to sleep, like you lay down and you go to sleep. You go to work too. But then you know, 45 minutes in, there's a meeting. And so, now you don't have a work day anymore, you have like this work moment that was only 45 minutes. And it's not really 45 minutes, it's more like 20 minutes, because it takes some time to get into it and then you've got to get out of it and you've got to go to a meeting!

"And managers are the biggest problem because their whole world is built around interruption. That's what they do. Management means interrupting. Hey, what's going on? How's this going? Let me call a meeting because that's what I do all day, I call meetings. And so, managers are the real problems here and that's got to change too."

As you just witnessed, Fried singles out management as interrupters. The truth is, he defines management as interruptions.

How can you dis-connote direction and interruptions?

Take some sort of survey inyour working environment. From a workers' mindset, how frequently are people interrupted? How hard is it to get focused, or even stay focused? How loud do you find it? Again, from their perspective, do meetings seem valuable?

But if the workers truly feel interrupted which their time may be wasted, they are going to frustrated about it and, obviously, less fruitful. Remedy the situation

It's time to take action. You can't control the economy or each worker's sense of accomplishment, but you can do your part to help the situation (versus fueling the flame).

Some Ideas: Rework your office space so that people aren't crammed next to each other. Institute a 'quiet time' like IBM and Intel did. It's just time to work on projects and be free from distraction. Minimize conversational and other noise-related distractions with sound masking, which provides a quieter, less stressful, more peaceful work environment. Streamline the tech devices you use - consider instituting something like 37Signals' Campfire system, or something akin to what Fried suggested, that enables workers to ignore nonessential interruptions and keep working until there's a natural break.

Published August 2nd, 2011

Filed in Business


Home Page   Articles