We know them all too well, the little time wasters that tear us out of our concentration: notifications, calls, postmen and kids who stop by, and the like. Now, while remote working can be as efficient as office work (according to Gallup), getting distracted is a different thing.
In fact, interruptions make you experience more stress, workload and frustration, even if you finish the tasks as fast as being uninterrupted.
Some pages like the muse (who tend to rewrite other articles and end up quoting lifehacker) wrongfully quote a study by the University of California Irvine, saying it takes 20minutes to get back into a task after an interruption. The study, however, finds that that people finished their tasks about as fast as if they would without interruption.
However: "After only 20 minutes of interrupted performance people reported significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort, and pressure."
Which is a heavy trade off if you have to keep up your work motivation over a prolonged period by yourself.
Fortunately, simple measures help us maintain focus and plan for these interruptions as far as possible - because we cannot prevent them. The underlying approach is to schedule blocks for work and blocks for breaks.
There are numerous aids for this, let's start and self-organise us a bit.
Keep a time log
Before you can increase your productivity, you need to know the distractions. To do this, maybe keep a time log for a week. Record this with a tool of your choice - Excel, notebook software, open simply a note or keep a sheet of paper where you add the time.
There are even some cool and innovative gadgets like timeular, a dice that you can simply turn and each side tracks a different task.
After about a week, you will have analysed your "time-behaviour" and determine the most significant disruptive factors in your daily routine. You can now address these in a targeted manner. The strategy is to specifically plan the repeating interruptions into the daily routine as far as possible, so they do not distract you when you should be in focus mode.
"Do not disturb" during block times
Avoiding interruptions in the first place can be the key to unlock your superpower.
Mute your mobile phone and deactivate push notifications on all devices. You can also use the "do not disturb" mode in the settings or use the flight mode if it really gets out of hand.
Plan meetings in one go
This goes hand in hand with block times. How do you spend the typically 30 to 60 minutes between two meeting sessions? Probably with "small" jobs like working on emails or on news websites. But It is more productive if you put meetings directly next to each other with a short break in between, if possible. With this, you free yourself up to larger blocks of time for longer tasks that need you to dig in a topic.
Schedule time blocks for emails
According to a paper by Danwood Group, although a few years old, they found that
The majority of emails, 70%, were reacted to within 6 seconds of them arriving and 85% were reacted to within 2 minutes of arriving.
The majority of employees have their email application set to check for email every 5 minutes.
This sums up heavily over a day and a week. Better is to not complete emails using notifications all the time, but plan time blocks, for example, 30 minutes at the start of work, 30 minutes after lunch and 30 minutes after work. You can leave your mail program closed for the rest of the time if you otherwise cannot resist the temptation to check the mail.
I tend to check them in the morning to see if something needs attention, then schedule the emails for a later point in the day, after I finished the more essential tasks of the day.
Include breaks and time for mental health or sport
No one can work concentrated for half a day or a full day without interruption. You should, therefore plan breaks in your daily work. The Pomodoro technique, for example, is widespread and often mentioned. This divides the time into blocks of 25 minutes, followed by a five-minute break. I go with more extended periods, more like 60minutes and 5 breaks. Which is not optimal for my back and shoulders as I tend to tense up. Thus I only do this in the morning during focus time. In the afternoon, I switch to shorter intervals to keep getting up and having more and shorter breaks, like, getting a glass of water. Play around with this, whatever works for you.
To include longer breaks into my schedule as well, I have a set time doing sports every day, and I reserve 60minutes for this (shower and cooldown included). This gives me about a 30-45min workout, which is plenty for me.
Avoid interference
If you have the chance, find a place where you can work undisturbed. This can be a special quiet zone in the office or a separate room that you use as an actual home office. Or you can adjust your working hours. For example, you can do essential tasks in the office early in the morning before the phone keeps ringing, or if you have kids after the kids are in bed.
Alternatively, If you are in a noisy environment, consider getting noise-cancelling headphones. Also, Whitenoise, forest sounds or a waterfall might help to block out noise, for instance, from a nearby street.
I hope that with these few tricks, you may reduce disruptions, and can focus on your work while not adding up additional stress and frustration over time.
Give them a try and keep doing what works best for you.
Stay awesome
Cheers
Andreas