5 distractions that are killing your productivity (And how you can get rid of them)
Let’s be honest …
We live in a noisy world. Notifications, calls, meetings, announcements, and news. Continuous interruptions try every day to attract your attention. But we’ve always had distractions.
More than a century ago this Clyde Betty story can teach you about the effect of living distracted.
The surviving lion tamer
Clyde Betty was born in Bainbridge, Ohio in 1903. In his youth, he left home to join the circus, his job being that of a cage cleaner. Clyde’s dream was to be a circus performer and over the years he rose rapidly from being the cleaning boy to being part of the main show.
Betty became famous for her act where she fought against wild animals, lions, tigers, jaguars, and hyenas. The most impressive thing is that all the tamers used to die in these acts and Clyde managed to be successful in his career until he was 60 years old when he died of cancer.
How could he survive 40 years of fighting against the most dangerous animals in the world?
thanks to a chair
The chair and the whip
The lion is the main show and Beatty’s ability to control it with his whip is what impresses the audience. But the chair is the one that does the most important work.
It turns out that when Clyde put the chair in his face, the lion sees the legs and his attention is divided into 4. He can’t decide what to attack and falls victim to analysis paralysis.
Avoid the fate of the Lion
Empty tasks are our day-to-day chair in the words of Cal Newport “They are tasks that do not require cognitive effort.”
Tasks such as meetings, emails, reviewing metrics, and collecting customers. Of course, they are important tasks that keep any business running. But no one will pay you more to answer every email instantly and have 5 Zoom meetings a day.
The chair makes us believe that we are being productive doing these tasks throughout the day. With our attention jumping from one to another.
But there is a solution to this
How to concentrate and avoid these 5 distractions
1. Unproductive meetings.
I hate zoom meetings with all my soul.
It’s okay to have calls and respond by mail to get updates on your projects. But having meetings all day is not synonymous with productivity. What it means is that you don’t have a system for you and your team to know how to do your tasks.
Solution 1: Set Systems
For example in a marketing agency onboarding a new client.
- The easiest: “Let’s have a meeting to see how we will work”
- The most difficult: “That the whole team knows in advance what they have to do and the delivery dates”
2. Check your emails every 5 minutes
A 2003 study published in the International Journal of Information Management found that the typical person checks email once every five minutes and that, on average, it takes 64 seconds to resume the previous task after checking their email.
Solution: Don’t check your email until noon
Checking your emails shouldn’t be the first task you do, nor should it be something that requires repeated attention throughout your day. If I don’t check my email at the beginning of the day, then I can use my morning to focus on my own agenda, instead of reacting to someone else’s agenda.
I understand, many companies demand the attention on email.
But how much time you can delay checking it.
Can you do it until noon? Until 10am? 9:30 a.m.? 8:30 a.m.?
3. Phone notifications
A study showed that on average we spend 6 hours and 49 minutes a day on our phones.
Checking the damn phone every 5 minutes is just as chaotic as the email.
Solution: Put the phone in another room
This small change tripled my productivity, if I don’t see the phone I don’t feel the need to pick it up.
4. Having many priorities
The way Warren Buffet and his employees get the chair out of their faces is with a simple 2-step system.
1. Make a list: Write 25 professional priorities on a piece of paper. It was difficult for me to write 25, so I did the exercise with 10.
2. Shorten the list: Go through it and circle between 3–5 activities that you have written. These should be the most important in your professional life. They are the ones that will significantly affect your trajectory. The ones that will best benefit you from the compound effect.
Now, you will be able to check your list and see if the new opportunities that arise are part of it. If they don’t then tell them “no”.
5. Overloaded To-do lists
The biggest problem with to-do lists is filling them with unnecessary tasks. You know that you will not complete 40 tasks in the day. If you reduce it to 20 tasks, you could complete them, but none of them will be well done.
Solution: Delegate or eliminate your tasks
Stop staring at the chair
Whenever you find that the world is putting a chair in your face, remember this: all you have to do is commit to one thing.
“Sometimes the decision you make is not as important as making the decision and committing to it” actor Mathew McConaughey wrote. You don’t even have to be successful, at first, all you need to do is start. One of the habits of successful people is that they start even if they don’t feel like it or the time doesn’t seem right.
Remember it is not a focus problem. It is a decision problem.
