Manage Distractions For a Productive Day
The first rule of Fight Distractions Club is, you do not talk about Fight Distractions Club. The second rule of Fight Distractions Club is, you do NOT talk about Fight Distractions Club. The third rule of Fight Distractions Club: a person’s phone goes off, a person interrupts someone who’s concentrating, or opens a closed door, the fight is over. Fourth rule: as many people as possible in the fight. Fifth rule: one task at a time. Sixth rule: fighting distractions is no screens. No notifications, no social media, no phone calls. Seventh rule: this fight goes as long as it has to. Eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Distractions Club, you have to fight.
The biggest obstacle standing between you and your most productive day is you and distractions. It’s not (necessarily) because you’re squirrel-brained or you’re neurodivergent or your brain is lazy or whatever. A lot of the reason you’re so distracted is just modern American culture.
The firehose of info and disinfo is getting in the way of more productivity in the workplace
Remember when people couldn’t get hold of you whenever they felt like it? Maybe you worked in an office and the receptionist screened your incoming calls and you could tell the receptionist to hold your calls. You couldn’t get on the internet at all, because either it didn’t exist (yet) beyond the walls of DARPA or your computer simply didn’t have it.
Maybe you’re too young for that, but you remember when social media didn’t exist. Yes, Virginia, there was an internet before MySpace. Actually, there was an internet before the HTTP protocol and everything was something.com. There were three TV stations plus PBS, or maybe you remember when there were four plus PBS.
When you wanted to go talk to someone at work, you often went to their desk. There was enough time. And you might stop by the (literal) water cooler to catch up with colleagues, or maybe you headed for the break room to do that.
Life was slower and simpler, but more importantly, you didn’t have a firehose of info washing over you every time you picked up your phone. Because mostly the phone was attached to the phone jack in the wall, and even when there were cell phones, all you could do was talk to someone.
During this slower, simpler time, you might advertise your business by putting a relatively cheap ad in the Yellow Pages, which had all the businesses in town. Or maybe you literally hung a sign outside your office with your name and the thing you did.
Sometimes people also sent postcards or other mailers, and a lot of businesses that focused on parents sponsored local kids athletic teams. And it WORKED.
There wasn’t as much noise to cut through, or as much choice (double-edged sword, choice.) Businesses didn’t have to be aggressive at using your brain against you. But obviously, that world is long gone. There’s a lot of noise and a lot of confusion and choice.
Now that we’re mostly a society of consumers, businesses have to work very hard at getting us to consume their thing. And if you’re a business owner, you’re trying to cut through the noise to reach your target audience.
Social media platforms are using what’s known about the reward systems in the human brain to try to trick us into staying longer on the platforms so they can put more ads in front of our eyeballs. Distracting us from whatever it was we were doing with dopamine hits of notifications, images, and moving pictures (!) to catch the eye. Modern culture is full of distractions.
Other distractions reduce productivity in the workplace
It’s not just social media (and other media) that are distracting. You may spend a lot of time putting out other people’s fires, especially if you’re a woman, because you’re supposed to help other people and put yourself last. (I have some thoughts about this; ahem, you can read more here).
But if you always drop everything to help other people, or your door is always open, when do you get to do the work that you need to do to move yourself and/or your business closer to your goals?
Some of the tools that you think are supposed to make you more productive may be backfiring on you. A to-do list in some form, analog or digital, can be helpful. But not if it’s got more than 3 items on it. (I know some of you have hundreds of items. It’s hurting you, not helping you.)
Some people do need project management software. But if it’s too cumbersome or complex it’s not going to help you simplify and manage your priorities.
Or you might have lots of ideas, and a lot of them are actually good! The problem is that you’re not working on the priorities that will give you the most bang for your buck, because you’re chasing the latest shiny object. Similarly, you might just find any movement or ideas you run across so interesting that you can’t stay on your priorities.
The solution is to fight distractions
Depending on what tends to distract you the most, you can engineer your environment to reduce or eliminate them. Even if you can’t, say, completely eliminate email notifications (and a lot of people can but they’re afraid to), you could reduce them. You could set boundaries around your work so that you have time kept sacred for your work, but you can still help others at different times.
I even have a quiz to help you discover what your distraction type is and what to do for better time management and a more productive day. Check it out here.
Recap
Don’t feel bad if you’re distracted, most of us are. Recognize what’s distracting you and then eliminate or reduce interruptions to improve your productivity in the workplace.