Lounge
Achieving mastery in a world of workday distractions
Summary
The ability to zero in on critical tasks gives individuals a competitive edge in the workplace
Most of us are not tasked with producing works of art, but there is no reason why we cannot produce works of enduring value. If you were to list down ten things that you produced in the last month, be it a presentation, a proposal, a piece of code or something else, which of these would you be proud of? Also, would the quality of your output change dramatically if you had been allowed to work undistracted?
Today, it’s rare to get the time and space to focus on work without distraction. Studies on workplace productivity suggest that most office workers do less than an hour of focused work each day. You can try testing this yourself using the timer on your phone. Start with a significant task that you need to finish. It could be a presentation, a proposal or something similar. Start the timer when you begin the task and stop it the minute any distraction crops up. Distractions include anything that makes you shift your focus from the task. A pop-up notification, a co-worker stopping by to chat, a call or message on your phone or simply losing focus. You can repeat this experiment on different days of the week.
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If your start-to-stop time is above fifteen minutes, then you are in the upper quartile of productive workers. The idea is to move this time to as close to an hour as possible using simple techniques and to then get multiple such productive hours in a working day. This will improve your efficiency, reduce stress and, more importantly, let you leave the office earlier.
This is what I gathered when I documented my typical workday. The first thing I did when I woke up in the morning was look at my phone. Usually, there are some WhatsApp notifications that demand attention. Then I scrolled through my mail to see what I missed when I was asleep. This is more out of habit, and it usually only serves to distract my attention. Once I reached the office, I was drawn into a couple of meetings that I had not planned for. After these meetings, I spent some time attending to emails until it was time for lunch with a colleague. Post-lunch, I convinced myself that I would focus on important tasks that included a presentation to the board. Halfway through finishing the presentation, I received a call to respond to a news query regarding an apparent crisis. By the time I finished attending to it, my ability to focus had largely left me, and I spent the remaining time attending to some irrelevant tasks before leaving for the day. The day felt very busy, but in reality, I hadn’t done much. During the commute home, I promised myself that tomorrow I would focus better. You would be familiar with this kind of day at work. The fact is that such days are common and make us feel tired but unfulfilled. ... There are two reasons that prevent us from achieving focus at work. The first is about not having a clear idea of what we want to accomplish. The second is to do with what is termed work creep, where non-priorities enter our workday.
When you are clear on the purpose and the time by which you want to accomplish something, focusing and avoiding distractions become much easier. You could be motivated by needing to submit work of high quality for a business meeting or you might have a career goal in mind, such as being selected to attend a leadership programme. Start by listing down what you would like to keep your focus on. It will be a basket, with some work needing to be delivered in a short span of time and others over a longer duration. Then all you need to do during your focus time is take out projects from this basket and work on them without allowing any distractions. Visualizing your goals in this fashion helps remind your brain that this is focus time….
In today’s workplace, more than half of a knowledge worker’s time is spent on activities that can be performed even while being distracted. This work involves coordination, follow-ups, meetings or other activities that do not require a large amount of focus. Once you gain some experience, this work becomes routine.
The ability to focus on the important gives you an edge in today’s workplace.
Edited excerpt from Human At Work by Richard Lobo, published with permission from Penguin Random House India.
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