What’s Interrupting Your Workday And How Do You Take It Back?
None of us will ever be well-oiled machines of productivity that are able to work without interruption or distraction for 100% of the day (barring planned breaks.) We’re all susceptible to lapses in concentration, as well as to issues with the tools we work with, and how we plan our work. However, you should always aim to increase your productivity, especially when interruptions to your work start to hit your bottom line. Here are some of the most common interruptions and what you might be able to do about them.
External interruptions
A lot of interruptions might seem somewhat beyond your control. It might be due to excess noise or due to people who come in and interrupt you with conversations, requests, and phone calls. In the office, you want to make sure that you are only interrupted when it is absolutely vital. Make sure the business is well organized so that employees and coworkers are less likely to interrupt you if they are better able to find the solutions to their problems themselves. You should also consider working with a virtual assistant (or a physical assistant if you have the space and budget) to vet calls and communications when you’re busy.
Tech interruptions
We all rely so much more on digital technology than those who worked before us, it should be no surprise that it can be a weakness as well as a strength. Lose access to your equipment or the data that is stored on it, be it due to a power cut, malfunction, or lack of internet access, and it can spoil a whole workday, easily. The best option here is to make sure that you have backups available. With the help of managed IT services, for instance, you can make sure that you make good use of the cloud so that you can access your data online when your own systems go down. It can also make your business more flexible if you and your team are able to access the software tools and data you need from home.
Internal interruptions
Some people are more distractable than others. This is no value judgment, just a simple fact. What’s important is how you handle the distractions that are likely to pop up. For instance, if you spend too much time in your emails, consider scheduling a specific 30 minutes or hour of the day to look through and organize your emails, with smaller planner checks throughout the day to make sure that you don’t miss anything important. Consider using a website blocker if there are any sites that can distract you for a long period of time during your workday, especially social media platforms.
If your work is getting interrupted several times a day, you don’t just lose the time that you spend dealing with that interruption. You can lose the flow that you’ve built through your work and it can take time and effort to get back into the right mindset. With the tips above, hopefully, that’s less of an issue.