How to Manage
Workplace Distractions
An ej4 eBook
How To Manage Workplace Distractions
Quick, what’s the one thing at work that
distracts you the most?
Is it a co-worker one cube down making too
much noise? Maybe someone is playing
distracting music nearby? It could even be
as simple as too many people stopping by
your office to check in.
Maybe your biggest workplace interruption
goes farther than that?
Maybe it’s a certain process…
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Things like:
 Email inbox alerts that consume you
 Disrupting colleagues
 Long, aimless meetings
 Trying to do too much
 And much, much more...
The more we become distracted, the harder it
becomes to stay productive. That much is true. But
when you start talking about how much workplace
distractions cost your company’s bottom line, now
we’re talking about a real problem.
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How can that number be so high?
Well, results from a Basex survey suggest that a typical
manager is interrupted nearly six times an hour, and the
average employee is interrupted almost 70 times a day.
How can anyone get any work done with that many
interruptions?
To answer that, ej4 has put together the following list of
not just the top distractions at work, but also the best
ways to beat them.
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Top Workplace
Distractions ... And
What You Can Do To
Overcome Them
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Email & Instant Message Alerts
Why Are They Distracting?
We have let technology interrupt our daily activities.
Numbers-wise, nearly 71% of people will answer an
IM notification within 2 seconds. As for emails? Over
41% respond to an email that’s only 15 seconds old.
Most employees will hear a “ding!” whenever a new
email comes through, and even have it set to do
the same on their phone. Some might have the
double whammy setup where they receive both an
IM and then an email saying they received an
IM. All in all, it can limit your productivity.
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What Should You Do?
First and foremost, limit
the amount of devices
you receive messages
through.
If your job requires you to
be out of the office a
majority of the time, it
may make sense to have
multiple notifications, but
we’re talking about
eliminating distractions in
the office. Determine
what is best for your
productivity.
Most applications let you adjust the notification
settings. For example, those who are avid users on
Google+ may receive daily emails of new followers,
comments on a post, etc.
Now, did you know you could choose how to receive
these notifications?
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Here’s How:
If you’re not comfortable with changing your
notifications, there are plenty of extensions and
apps out there that allow you to delay an email
from popping up. Some even will sort priority over
standard email deliveries, so there’s no fear of
missing out on anything.
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If you don’t want to turn off all of your notifications,
another good practice is to dedicate certain blocks
of time in the morning, afternoon, and late-afternoon
to read and respond to emails.
You don’t have to go completely off the grid when
you’re not in these scheduled “answer-every-emailblocks,” but this strategy allows more time to stay on
task and get things done.
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Loud Colleagues
Why Are They Distracting?
Every employee
has to deal with a
certain level of
talking in the
workplace.
Employees
collaborate with
one another, we
seek advice, offer
opinions and try to
parse out the daily
grind with some
idle chitchat.
We all get distracted when a colleague constantly
stops by to dish on sports, the news, or the weather.
This makes it difficult to return to the task at hand.
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And most employees won’t ask another
employee to stop bothering them right then and
there for fear of being rude.
But that doesn’t mean they won’t vent about it
elsewhere.
A recent survey from Ask.com revealed over
63% of employees feel noisy colleagues are
the number one distraction at work.
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What Should You Do?
Companies don’t need to install “quiet time” hours.
Managers must be transparent with employees and
let them know their time is valuable. If wasted hours
on casual conversation becomes a real problem, you
could deliver short training clips on effective time
management tips.
Remind your colleagues to be considerate of others
time, and be able to identify clues that they have
overstayed their welcome. Or if you’re the employee
who needs to be sequestered to get your work done,
just close your door. I know that strays from the 50/50
open door rule we talked about in a previous blog,
but use your best judgment.
Your chatty colleague will understand.
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Meetings, Meetings, Meetings
Why They Are Distracting?
Many would agree that not every meeting has
merit. In fact, most employees feel they are being
dragged to meetings where they have no business
attending. Some meetings are merely a meeting
about a future meeting with no set agenda. But
the worst offender is the meeting that continues to
go off-topic and waste everyone’s time.
Sound familiar?
Poorly thought-out meetings are not just glaring
distractions; when you consider salary cost, bad
meetings cost U.S. companies nearly $37 billion
dollars annually.
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On average, most employees will have been to 62
meetings per month. Assuming each meeting is at least 30
minutes long - that’s nearly 31 hours of meetings a month.
Here’s an estimate on how much meetings cost per
employee
Infographic
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What Should You Do?
Come up with a better meeting process:
 Deliver training to managers and employees on
how to conduct the most effective meetings for
your organization.
 Designate a moderator to keep the meeting
agenda on task.
 Keep your attendance figures low. Invite only the
people that are needed to attend.
 Start every meeting with a SMART goal. If those
involved can’t walk away from the meeting and
tackle an objective then why have the meeting?
 State the SMART goal of every meeting from the
beginning. This way, you avoid off-topic discussions
from taking precedent.
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The Extreme Multitasker
Why This Is Distracting?
It seems multitasking is a prerequisite with any job
these days. We try to divide our attention
between multiple tasks and not make a mistake.
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People think being able to juggle 4 or 5 tasks shows
hustle, when in fact, research proves you’re not
completing everything correctly.
A team of scientists at the University of Texas at Austin
found that the more divided attention we bring to
our brain, the less productive we become. In fact,
they feel there’s only around 10 percent of the
population that could be classified as “decent
multitaskers.”
Scientists went on to monitor a batch of employees in
a work environment on how frequent their urge to
multitask was.
After a few days of research, they found every
employee would jump from an activity every 3
minutes. With the constant run-around, it’s no surprise
they reported higher stress levels and burnout.
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What Should You Do?
Create a better routine.
The more you train your brain to become familiar
with your routine – scheduling your day,
responding to emails, planning meetings, and just
plain old hard work - the easier it is to do the right
things right.
When you start to create a better routine, don’t
assume that you’re ready to ramp up your
multitasking ability. It’s all about focusing your
efforts on one task at a time.
Since most people from the study jumped to a
new task in 3 minutes, try starting with 10 minutes.
Then measure how productive you are when you
push yourself to stay on task.
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Smartphones
Why Are They Distracting?
When you send off a text, do you stare at your
phone awaiting the response?
Then all you do for the next 5 or 10 minutes is sit
and waste time waiting for the reply? It’s frustrating
when someone doesn’t respond immediately,
especially if it’s an urgent matter. Do you do the
same thing while waiting for a response on a
personal matter?
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That’s just one minor example of why
smartphones, as helpful as they are, still drain our
productivity. The list could continue with games,
social media, news, shopping, sports, and
weather.
The connection between instantaneous
smartphone distractions was recently linked to a
Michigan State University study where they found
that any time there was an interruption of nearly
four-and-a-half seconds, workplace errors tripled.
Like we mentioned in our first distraction, the
more push notifications you have, work-related or
not, the more spontaneous distractions are
allowed to take hold of your work and create a
distracted workplace.
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What Should You Do?
The easy answer would be to just shut down your
phone completely, but we know this is not a
realistic approach.
You can’t completely disable your smartphones,
but you must be smart about when you have it
available.
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Start with some of the following:
 Disable all non-work related push notifications.
 Set your phone to silent mode while at your desk
- both for the sake of your productivity and the
co-workers around you.
 Try using the “Do Not Disturb” feature when
completing your work. If it is a true emergency
people will always find a way to connect. Try it
out.
 Schedule blocks of time to answer texts, return
personal missed calls, etc.
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Conclusion
With the resources and information found in this
eBook we have provided a guide to becoming
more productive at work.
Should a pattern of workplace distractions
develop, then it’s time to refresh your team on
the importance of time management with a
select list of off-the-shelf eLearning courses.
If that is not enough, you could create your own
custom training video addressing your specific
productivity issues.
As we’ve shown even the tiniest distraction can
be costly to any company.
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Learn how you can
keep yourself and
your team more
productive today
with ej4’s extensive
eLearning library.