We are too often distracted, knocking down the rhythm and making it difficult to focus, says business analyst Jason Freed.
Entering the office, you find yourself in a food processor that grinds the working day into many parts. 30 minutes you are doing something, then you are distracted or there is another important thing, then you get another 20 minutes of quiet work on the task. Then lunch. And so every day. And then you wonder: “How so? I was at work. I worked at the table. I attended the right meetings. How did it happen that I didn’t have time to do what I needed to do?”
Usually, to cope with a task, we need a series of long periods of time (several hours), who can be fully dedicated to work. That is why many would prefer to work at home, come to work very early or, on the contrary, stay late, because at this time no one bothers us. At the same time, managers, realizing that there are too many distractions in the office, have in mind social networks and personal mail. But their danger is small, because we are distracted by them at will, whenever we want. This is the modern analogue of a smoke break.
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The real problems – I call them M&M – are managers and events. The job of managers is precisely to interrupt your work. They must constantly monitor everything, ask: “How are things going?” Ironically, they often distract you with these questions when you are most engrossed in your work. But the worst thing is the meetings. I find meetings to be the most horrible, toxic way to spend time at work. How, knowing this, could we improve our productivity and make the office more attractive to work in? Many of you are familiar with the concept of “informal Friday”. What about Silent Thursday? For example, you can set aside one day a month when none of the employees talk to each other in the afternoon. You will notice that the mountain of cases begins to rake up by itself. We usually start working effectively when no one distracts us. 3-4 hours without breaks is the best gift a leader can give to a subordinate. Of course, such “silent” days can be arranged more often. Another idea is to move from face-to-face communication, with eternal pats on the shoulder, greetings and other rituals, to the correspondence exchange of information using online services. We have a choice: we can read the messages when and in the order that suits us. Finally, the smartest thing to do with most meetings is to simply cancel them. When we have more opportunity to allocate our own time, it turns out that the planned discussions were not so necessary.
Jason Fried, founder of IT company 37signals, bestselling author of Remote: No Office Required (Mann, Ivanov, and Ferber, 2014). You can watch his talk on ted.com.