A TV commercial features a telecommuter lolling around with his cat, saying it’s hard to get any work done – unaware his boss and coworkers are listening to his comments through the open microphone on his computer.
It is hard to get much done in today’s work environment, whether you’re home based or work in an office.
<h3>A poll featured in the Wall Street Journal finds the average office employee is interrupted every three minutes.</h3>
The surprise is that the interruption is not always caused by colleagues stopped by to chat or incoming calls from the boss. We constantly self-interrupt. Distractions come in both digital and human form, as we add more and more technical tools and increasing demands compete for our attention.
<h3>Does your day go something like this?</h3>
You start working on an important report, only to be distracted by the “ping” of an incoming email, followed by a text alert on your smart phone. An internal office message pops up on your screen and a new social media post catches your eye. Meanwhile, two coworkers start discussing the upcoming staff Christmas party a few feet away from your desk, while someone else nearby holds a loud cell phone conversation. How can you possibly get any real work done with all this going on?
It’s hard, very hard. In our quest to become more efficient, increase accessibility and improve communication, we can easily sabotage ourselves. Today’s focus on collaborative work strategies mean more meetings to attend, conversations to have, and a bigger need for constant back and forth communication. We’re becoming trained to jump between tasks by the perception we need to respond immediately to digital messages. The word priority has lost some of its meaning, as we multitask and constantly switch focus to meet the demands we perceive.
<h3>Something’s got to give.</h3>
Frustrated workers try to finish projects by coming in early, staying late or over lunch – or leave them incomplete. A sense of accomplishment is becoming something of the past. Managers and companies don’t see the productivity they anticipated through the implementation of leading edge technology.
Digital distraction is now a field of study, and one University of California researcher finds it takes an average of 23 minutes for someone to return to their original task after their attention is interrupted. Dealing with emails can eat up almost half an employee’s day and open office environments subject inhabitants to a non-stop stream of interruptions and distractions.
Surprisingly, it’s high tech companies that are developing solutions. eBay has a “no device” policy during meetings and Intel encourages staff to block out periods for in-depth thinking and problem solving, when emails and other distractions are ignored. Atos, a global IT company based in Europe, has vowed to phase out the use of emails for internal communication after finding workers were spending more than two hours each day processing them.
If you find you’re exhausted at the end of the day and although you were busy, you don’t feel as if you’ve accomplished much, chances are you’re suffering from device overload. The “multi-monitor experience” dilutes people’s attention, the experts say. Take a page from the high tech companies who recognize this is becoming a real problem and think about what you can personally do to better manage your digital world. You aren’t powerless, just wireless.