Do you feel like someone calls your name just when you being to focus on a task?

Think about your typical work day.  Then, pretend like you have a virtual highlighter to underline what you relate with from the following excerpt:

Yeah, my feeling is that the modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimized for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work. They are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about, it’s interruptions. Everyone’s calling meetings all the time, everyone’s screaming people’s names across the thing, there’s phones ringing all the time. People are walking around. It’s all about interruptions. And people go to work today, and then they end up doing most of their real work after work, or on the weekends. So, people are working longer hours, people are tired – I’m working 50-60 hours this week. It’s not that there’s 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do, it’s because you don’t work at work anymore. You go to work to get interrupted.

Maybe it was working on nights and weekends just to get the job done or maybe it was the idea of distractions and interruptions in general…either way, it sounds like the modern worker isn’t getting a whole lot of work done from 9-5.

So, what can you do?

There are a variety of options for dealing with frustrations at work:

• Get really mad and pout.
• Complain to you coworkers and ensure that they, too, have to spend their nights and weekends doing what they should have been doing while they were listening to you.
• Do something about it.

You might see which way I’m gonna go with this, and you may have thought o it yourself and just been unsure how to be proactive.  So, the first step is always admitting you have a problem: this time it’s realizing that you can’t control the work environment.  The next step is taking control of what you can, which is minimizing distractions and their effects.  Here are a few distraction-minimizing techniques:

• Set a reasonable limit on how frequently you check your email, especially your personal mail.  It may work for you to check it 3 times: first thing in the morning, around lunch, and end of day.  However, your work may be directly related to checking email, so you will have to be the judge.  It’s still wise to limit personal activity at work.
• Restrain your socializing.  It’s healthy to take breaks and enjoy water cooler gossip, but hanging around the break room most of the work day is not.  Again, think about being strategic- when you grab your morning coffee, purpose to chat for 5 minutes, but no more.
• Pair your social breaks with work breaks- to avoid eye strain, it’s wise to frequently blink and focus on something other than the computer screen.  So, take a few minutes every hour to rest your eyes, stretch your back, neck, and shoulders, and get a few minutes of talking in.
• Try white noise, like this free white noise generator, to block irritating or distracting noises (see above for great examples of typical distractors!).

By experimenting with how you spend your time and what you let distract you, you should be able to reclaim your nights and weekends by actually getting your work done- at work!