The Number 1 Problem at Work – and a few ways to fix it

How many of you encounter productivity traps in your day-to-day work? I’m guessing the answer is most of you, if not ALL of you. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. I too have moments of weakness where my mind gets distracted by social media, catching up with celebrity gossip and finalising dinner plans with friends via text.

However, the word ‘trap’ implies that we’ve fallen victim to some unknown danger, but the reality is that our lapses in productivity are easily remedied by someone we know very well: ourselves.

That’s right! We’re not helpless and can, in fact, overcome these productivity leaches by making ourselves more aware and slightly adjusting the way we work. All it takes is willpower, intention and practise.

The biggest problem is that all the technology that surrounds us has become a source of food for our hungry brains. For example, every time we receive an email, an instant message or a text, our brains spring into action. These small, innocent alerts are like a technological sugar rush and, like a sugar rush, they give us a small high followed by a lull.

So what’s the answer? Well, I’m glad you asked because I’ve identified three time-killers that we all need to be aware of:

Tab-tastic browsing

Firefox, Google Chrome and even good old Internet Explorer now all offer us tabbed browsing. And while many people think that it increases productivity, I’m here to tell you that it can actually hinder it.

Too many open tabs either signals serious procrastination, or an inability to focus on the task in hand. After all, you can only really focus on one tab at a time, so once you’ve completely finished with it, close it. You can always open it again if you need later.

An article I read last year on Lifehacker entitled Why You Should Never Have More Than Nine Browser Tabs Open really stuck with me. Check it out for yourself.

The scourge of email

Okay so ‘scourge’ may be a strong word to use but you get what I mean. Email is both our best friend and our biggest enemy. We’ve got into this strange habit of automatically dropping whatever it is that we’re doing to reply to an email.

This is a really unproductive situation to find ourselves in and a much better approach is to treat each email on its own merits. For example, if you get an urgent email that requires a quick response deal with it. Everything else can wait until later.

Never attempt to use your inbox as a task list – it won’t work. You’ll never empty it because the very nature of email means that it keeps on coming. If needs be, write yourself a good old-fashioned handwritten list to work from.

Your smartphone

I understand that smartphones are really useful. In fact, they’re fantastic, but they can also be one of our biggest distractions in the office. Nowadays, nearly all our smartphones are sync’d to our emails, our calendars and then there are text messages.

If you’re sat in front of your computer, do you really need an alert that you’ve got a new email?

The solution, you ask? Simply switch it off. If you can’t bring yourself to do that then put it into airplane mode; even silent will do. Basically, any mode that will allow you to focus on your work and not on your phone!

At the end of the day, your smartphone isn’t the be all and end all. If you’re not convinced, check out another recent post that I wrote pitting smartphones against virtual assistants.

These are just three day-to-day distractions that we all face. There are hundreds more and while we might not be able to do anything to eradicate the sound of a loud, nagging colleague, we can get our own houses in order.

Image courtesy of pakorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net