Last Updated on July 12, 2022 by Dayanand Kadella
Being Distractable has become easy in this full of the technology-oriented world. We’re getting more and more distracted during work in a world of push alerts, emails, instant chatting, and compressed offices. About 80% of the interruptions that the average employee receives each day range from 50 to 60 and are meaningless. As a result, according to McKinsey’s study, individuals aren’t spending enough time in what psychologists refer to as “the flow state,” an environment where workers may be up to five times more productive.
How being Distractable damages you:
Life in the modern day is afflicted with distractions.
A typical office worker can’t concentrate on a job for longer than 11 minutes at a time. The typical student can’t keep their attention on a task for longer than two minutes before becoming distracted. Your average online screen attention spans just 40 seconds if you’re a regular Internet user. To cope with these, you’ve to avoid being Distractable by following these 10 best ways.
Tips for not-to-be Distractable:
1. Start an Asynchronous way of Communication
whenever you receive an email, It’s OK to think, “I’ll get to this when it suits me”. Asynchronous way of communication benefits individuals by expanding the amount of time we have to reply to a request, in addition to the advantage of providing people more uninterrupted time to concentrate. Making judgments in real-time when on a phone conversation or video chat is different than doing so while speaking via email, where you have more time to consider your response. This is one way of not-to-be Distractable.
We need to get rid of the arbitrary “emergency” that still plagues workplaces throughout the globe nearly a century after Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “I have two sorts of problems: the urgent and the significant.” Dr. J. Roscoe Miller is the president of Northwestern University. The important is never urgent, and the urgent is never important. The previous president is claimed to have prioritized his own workload using the “Eisenhower Principle.”
Include the following in your original request to make asynchronous communication as effective as possible and to reduce the number of follow-up emails:
- sufficient information
- distinctive action item (s)
- a clear deadline
- A line of action you can take if the receiver can’t satisfy your expectations
2. Checking it Quickly
Over the course of a day, “just quickly checking” anything even for one-tenth of a second can result in a 40% productivity loss, and it can take us 23 minutes to return to the task at hand.
We should bulk check email, instant chats, social media, and even SMS messages at set periods rather than doing it randomly throughout the day.
If you have trouble controlling yourself, and looking for not-to-be Distractable, then you may stop your inbox after you’ve checked it and only un-pause it when you’re ready using tools like Gmail’s Inbox Pause plugin. You may also restrict access to particular websites and applications during predetermined times using Blocksite and the Freedom app.
Read Also: 7 TIPS TO BE PRODUCTIVE – an ultimate Guide to Productivity
3. Do Not Interrupt
If you’re thinking to yourself as you read this, “But I work in an open-spaced office, and it’s difficult to avoid disturbances,” consider employing a signaling method to let your colleagues know that you’re in the zone (or attempting to get there), and that they shouldn’t bother you unless it’s truly essential. This may be as straightforward as a set of headphones.
4. Do not play Calendar Tetris.
It’s a generally recognized practice in the workplace today for people to schedule time on their calendar, frequently at the expense of their own priorities.
On a Future Squared podcast, Basecamp CEO Jason Fried said that you can’t schedule the time and give deadlines on someone’s calendar at Basecamp without first getting their concern. It follows that the majority of meetings just don’t take place since the would-be meeting organizer often chooses to communicate by phone or instant messaging instead.
As a potential substitute, think about putting meeting-free periods on your calendar or using a meeting scheduling tool like Calendly so that people can only build connections by scheduling meetings with you during those times. This will free up the rest of the day for focus and prevent the email tennis matches that frequently result from scheduling meetings.
5. Close the Meetings Loop
Make sure you leave every meeting with concrete next steps, clearly delineated roles, and due dates rather than taking the chance of follow-up interruptions and a meeting to review the prior meeting.
6. Reject “Reply All”
Reply All merely fills people’s inboxes and mental spaces with pointless talk when utilized as a sharing instrument for accountability. Take more responsibility for your choices, and only email those that require it.
7. Employ Third spaces
The Wall Street Journal’s Sue Shellenbarger observed that “all of this social engineering (open-plan workplaces) has generated numerous diversions that divert employees’ attention away from their own screens. Visual noise, which is the activity or movement outside of a worker’s range of view, can impair analytical thinking or creativity and degrade attention.
If open-plan workplaces are making it difficult for you to think critically, consider adding more third-space work to your day. To do this, look for a quiet area of the office, a serviced office, or arrange for some time to work from home.
8. Deactivate push notifications
Every day, the average person gets 46 push alerts. Disabling your push notifications “Off” will prevent us from reacting on cue due to our Pavlovian instincts.
9. Adopt Airplane Mode.
Additionally, you may utilize airplane mode to reduce phone and text message interruptions during specific hours of the day. You may always exclude some numbers, such as those of close friends or esteemed and significant business partners if the thought of doing so makes you nervous. On an iPhone, you may configure “Do Not Disturb” mode to only allow some “preferred” contacts to reach you while muting all other calls and texts.
10. Limiting approval layers
Despite being more challenging to accomplish, becoming a “minimal viable bureaucracy” entails eliminating pointless levels of permissions needed to do insignificant and insignificant tasks. As a result, there will be less paperwork to move around, which implies fewer interruptions for people.
Final Thoughts:
Being Distractable is dangerous for all of us. People are less productive and more disturbed than ever as a result of continual interruptions, which, according to the American Institute of Stress, is mostly caused by a loss of control over one’s job. How can we manage our time effectively, not-to-be Distractable, do our best work, and enhance our emotional wellbeing at work by avoiding distractions?
Read Also: 11 TIME MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES YOU SHOULD KNOW