Are distractions in the office stopping you from getting anything done?
|
Taking breaks during the work day is essential to ensuring your work is effective and you don’t tire out, but sometimes there can be too many workplace distractions to get anything done! Now let’s be realistic, you can’t eliminate all distractions from the office but you can learn to minimise the amount of times you are being drawn away from your work.
Emails
Whilst emails can be an important part of your daily communication, it’s essential to set aside specific times to check your emails and work through them in priority order. If you’re checking your emails every 5 minutes you’re never going to get stuck into your work to get things done. Unless it’s urgent put it to one side and deal with it later, otherwise you end up responding to emails all day!
|
 |
Phone calls
Depending on your line of work you could be on the phone all day as part of your job and you will obviously need to answer the phone as soon as it rings. But if your job is not telephone based it’s important to not get bogged down answering phone calls, don’t be afraid to let some calls go to voicemail to deal with in your ‘responding to queries time’. I don’t mean leave it until the end of the day, block out times in your diary that are dedicated to getting important work done and other times to respond to emails and telephone calls.
Office chats
A busy atmosphere in the office can often create a highly distracting place to work with different conversations going on in each corner of the office. If you don’t notice this going on it’s highly likely you’re contributing to it so try to minimise the amount of times you lose focus on your work and start a conversation. If you find others are distracting you by their conversations you could ask for an hour quite time to focus, or if that’s not possible you can take some earplugs into work and just let everyone know that you’re going to have your head down working for the next hour or so!
Snacks
Whilst we all need to eat, we don’t need to be snacking on another sugary treat every hour of the day. For starters this can cause highs and lows in energy levels and also takes you away from your work yet again. Eat a good healthy breakfast before you go to work so that you can sustain energy until lunchtime and eat your lunch away from your desk so that you can eat your lunch without thinking about work, and work without thinking about food.
Breaks
Now I know we’re talking about eliminating all of these extra little breaks we are having through distractions but it’s also essential to have enough breaks throughout the day to keep our mental ability on top form. It’s easy to work through the whole day without leaving your desk aside from a toilet break, but you may find that when you have a pile of work that needs completing you’ll actually get more done if you take scheduled breaks and take your mind away from your work for a period of time. I recommend going for a walk and getting active, getting the blood flowing will give you more energy throughout the day and you’ll be able to focus a lot more on what you need to do! And you’ll probably leave work on time for once!
Time management
I’ve mentioned in each topic about scheduling time for certain activities, this has to be the most important piece of advice I was once given in order to manage distractions. We can’t put everything off forever but if we schedule a specific time of day to get those things done, we will get them done!
I hope this helps you to manage your own workplace distractions, and to become more effective in your work. Do you have another other distractions in your workplace that you don’t know how to get past?
About First2Recruit
First2Recruit, are an owner managed recruitment consultancy providing a full recruitment service including; permanent and FTC positions in Accountancy Practice and Insolvency across the UK.
Alternatively, visit www.first2recruit.co.uk or call one of their friendly team on 01722 440 168.