A Few Ideas to Help You Overcome Distraction
“Doomscrolling” can be prevented.
You know when you begin scrolling down Facebook or Twitter and the next thing you know the sun has set? It has a name: doomscrolling. Doomscrolling happens in large part because of a feature created by one man: Aza Raskin, an interface designer who went on to co-found the Center for Human Technology.
When he created the infinite scroll feature, his aim was to eliminate the need to hit “next page”. He didn’t appreciate the feature would limit any chance for your brain to escape an endless stream of content. Raskin, told The Times,
“If you don’t give your brain time to catch up with your impulses, you just keep scrolling.”
He now estimates that his little feature wastes 200,000 lifetimes of human attention per day. We experience each piece of content individually, but the danger is in the cumulative effect. In fact, that’s true of all distractions, and the result is that workers and managers have no idea how much productivity is going down the drain. Here’s the truth: the average office worker is distracted about 20% of their workday.
You’re Way More Distracted Than You Think
You’re not alone. Everyone underestimates how distracted they are at work. On average, we waste 2 full hours every day on interruptions and distractions. That’s 10 hours a week, or almost 40 hours a month. Let’s spell it out: if you cut out the distractions at work, you could start working 4 days a week and your output would stay the same.
But for many of us, the most damaging distractions at work aren’t found in hours of scrolling through Instagram, but through a high volume of small interruptions. Because the small ones are hard to notice, we tend to downplay the impact each distraction has on our productivity. These small distractions are fatal because it can take up to 23 minutes to re-engage in deep work. That means when you turn back to work after a distraction, you’ll spend 20 minutes just trying to give your task full attention.
The good news is that distractions at work are not inevitable. No one is born productive — beating distractions is a skill that can be taught and learned. That means that with the right teacher, you can significantly reduce their impact on your productivity by changing the way you work.
Use Small Data To Identify Your Productivity Killers
How much time do you personally waste every day? The truth is that you don’t know. When Building 20 runs productivity training, they distribute a Distraction Scorecard so that participants can record each time their work is interrupted. The results are shocking.
Take some time to make a note of the distractions in your workday. Once you’ve tallied the frequency and duration of your workday interruptions, you’ll have for the first time visibility into your productivity killers. With that data, you’ll finally be able to act. Keeping this visible in your workspace is a great reminder to hold yourself accountable for the time you waste.
Here’s the type of thing you might discover. When Building 20 asked a wide range of businesses and industries to record their distractions, these were their biggest causes of lost time:
Understanding the full extent of the problem is a great place to start. Next, you need to take proactive steps to tackle the culprits stealing your time.
Make The Changes That Work For You
Now that you have identified your biggest daily distractions, it is time to decide how you will reduce each of them. Here are some of the basic changes to consider:
Coworker Interruptions
Not all distractions are equal, and not all co-worker interactions are valuable. The trick is communicating your availability. Reducing distractions from colleagues can be a sensitive issue, so agree with your team on a signal that shows when you should not be distracted. For example, closing your office door or wearing noise-canceling headphones. These signals let you protect time for deep work but still be approachable for collaboration at other times.
For teams that communicate digitally, make use of statuses and offline mode to let others know not to disturb you. If you’re using Slack use apps like Clockwise to automatically update your status based on what’s in your calendar.
Notification Overload
Which notifications do you actually need at work? On average we look at our phones 85 times a day. This is more than most of us think we do, and a lot more than we really need to. Cutting out the notifications buzzing for your attention every 5 minutes is an important step.
Pop-ups from your personal messages, social media, or desktop apps create the temptation to stop working and check out the notification. Whether you click it or not, part of your brain is now thinking about that instead of the task at hand. And if you aren’t going to click personal notifications, why do you need them?
If you’ve got an iPhone or use iOS, the easiest, and most terrifying, way to see the damage of notifications is to visit Screentime in your phone’s settings. Most people know Screentime for the push notification it sends, but few realize that Apple now allows you to visualize all this data in your settings. Give it a visit so you can find the low hanging fruit.
Don’t Just Resist Temptation — Remove It
Disable all unnecessary notifications through your app settings, keep your browser clear of social media tabs, and if you are struggling to resist temptation use apps like Self Control and Forest to take away the option.
Even if you’ve rid yourself of notifications, your phone may be costing you more than 20 minutes of your workday. Removing your personal devices from your work area can also help reduce the temptation to be distracted. You are a lot less likely to ‘quickly’ check your social media if you have to first retrieve your phone from another room. Even better, keep your phone in someone else’s drawer. Now you will only go for your phone when you actually need it.
Don’t ignore the impact distractions have on your team’s productivity. Even the most high-performing teams lose weeks of time each year to these overlooked interruptions.
Conclusion
Time is slipping away because you’re way more distracted than you think. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s what you need to do:
- Take some time to make a note of the distractions in your workday.
- Communicate to those around you when it’s time for you to focus.
- Decide which notifications you need in your life. The answer is probably not many.
- Remove temptations when it’s time for deep work.
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