Top Ten Distractions in the Office

April 9th, 2007 · No Comments

I was recently asked what the Top Ten Office Distractions were. The first ones that came to mind were easy. They were the topics always mentioned by my clients in individual consultations and by my audiences in my time management training seminars:

1. Email with its alerts and overflowing inbox

2. Telephone calls that constantly interrupt

3. Paper stacks that you shift through frequently

Of themselves, those are enough to overwhelm a person each day. However there are other distractions causing you to lose valuable minutes of productivity. Some of these you may not think of as a distraction at first. Yet anything that takes your focus away from work at hand can be an interruption. These are the issues that come to the forefront when I contemplate office distractions:

4. Visitors dropping by, both clients and colleagues

5. Environment, including temperature and lighting

6. Noise from co-workers or outside activities

7. Meetings that can consume a large part of the day

8. Lists that you keep looking at again and again

9. Expectations of immediate responses

10. You becoming bored and shifting focuses

The first step in limiting distractions is to be aware of them. Then you can begin to make the changes that will add to your daily productivity.

Tags: Interruptions & Distractions · Office Productivity · Time Management Strategies

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