Reached office at 9:00 AM, in the morning! Even before we start our work for the day we already start calculating the time to leave for the day as the company asks employees to log minimum 8 hours a day. This is the usual mantra of most of the employees and not to forget those enormous breaks and distractions.
So the calculation starts –
- 30 minutes (coffee / tea / breakfast / snacks)
- 30 minutes of lunch. (Damn! 1 hr out-time already)
- 8 hours of DUTY which contains meetings, chit-chats, breaks, power naps, nothings and of-course WORK.
Finally, day ends and employee Leaves office at 6:00 PM. Next day you need to fill time-sheet of the previous day.
- What do you enter?
- 8 hours of work?
- You kidding me, aren’t you?
Come on, we are not machines to work without any breaks or relaxations or say any other distractions!
As per studies, every 11 minutes a typical employee or worker gets distracted in his or her workplace. But, to get back to the same rhythm of the work you left in between, may take up to 23 minutes. Just imagine the loss to the business if this happens to every employee in the office. More importantly, think about your own productivity level which will directly affect your career growth.
When someone says distractions, a lot of reasons may arise in your dreams, however as per the employer’s survey’s few of the biggest productivity killers in the workplace are:
- Cell phones / texting
- Internet
- Gossip
- Social media
- co-workers dropping by
- Meetings
- Smoke breaks/snack breaks
- Noisy co-workers
- lost in thoughts (thinking about the movie / serial watched recently)
- Thinking about personal worries or problems into the work place.
This surely affects the productivity and also the quality of the work resulting in spoiling the employee-boss relationship. We definitely need to take breaks to boost our energy and improve our thinking process etc. but not at the cost of quality and not depleting our energy.
Collective measures should be taken by employees as well as employers to ensure people are not distracted from their work. Few of them could be:
- Applying firewalls in the office, so as to restrict their employees from browsing unwanted sites.
- Employees should be allowed to take scheduled breaks. A quick 10-15 minutes walk outside the office would also help in boosting our energy.
- Even quick exercises for that matter will rejuvenate the brain cells.
- Boasting also helps a lot sometimes. People get motivated when they see themselves progressing or even reaching some goals.
- Let the colleagues know who did what? Help them picture the same on notice boards, on challenges faced by them and achieving their targets. When the rest of the crowd gets to know the same, one feels confident when they speak or applaud on their achievements. In short, make it public!
- Try to move around with people who are always productive, environment matters a lot. More on this is in the article which speaks on your colleagues influences on you.
- Even if you got a co-worker who is a chit-chatter, speak technically. That would either gain each of your knowledge or stop him from further speaking nonsense. In that case, you win, though it’s heads or a tail!
A lot of things can be mentioned and a lot of tips can be given in this section; however not everything can be taught. Read our article which helps one to manage a day at office effectively.
Learn how to starve your distractions and feed your focus.
