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In my younger days, a former boss said to me “it’s not the number of hours you work, but rather the quality of work in those hours.” She said this in response to the number of hours it typically took to finish bigger projects. In the big picture, the projects were getting finished and done well, but they were just taking too long to finish.
So my boss and I decided to meet to express both of our frustrations. I was frustrated with the number of hours I was working per week and she was frustrated with the length of time it was taking for solutions to reach the floor. What we decided to do was to keep a log of my working hours and try to find a pattern as to whether or not there was a time leak.
The results were disturbing. What I found was that although I was punching the hours working on various projects, I was not focused solely on that project during all of those hours. While I was supposedly punching hours working on a particular task, I would provide myself for a means of several distractions. Responding to email, completing requests for other employees, phone calls, coffee breaks, etc. all took away from my focused work while I was keeping the log.
So after we discussed the findings of my log we found our cause of the extra time spent working of projects. But my boss, who to her credit had a vested interest in seeing me flourish in my role, decided to help me rectify this issue. So what we did was create an environment where I could focus directly on the current task. I thought about what type of surroundings I would need get completely “in the zone” and achieve a state of working flow. Like a lot of people would suggest, eliminating distractions was task number one.
The role I had at that time was information technology manager, with one part time technician working for me. The problem with this setup is that I would get requests for everything from deploying software company-wide, to fixing someone’s speakers. So the influx of requests on a daily basis was overwhelming. There was a steady stream of users coming to my office to ask for my assistance.
For me, working on technical projects requires my complete focus and attention to achieve any meaningful results and what I realized that every time I was interrupted, it took me at least 10-15 minutes to get back to the point where I’m productive. The other major realization was that I was completing the majority of my big tasks after hours or at home.
Putting it all together
One day I decided to take action. The first thing I did was to change offices to an area of the building that was out of the way. I also requested that all requests for my assistance would have to come to me through email. And email was to be checked only during scheduled breaks from my major project
It did not take long for the results to come back. And those results were amazing! Plain and simple, my productivity skyrocketed to new heights and a once rocky relationship between the boss and me was repaired.
At that point in my career, I was just out of university and the entire IT infrastructure was in my hands as well as the stress that comes along with it. This simple yet very effective exercise was something that university never gave me. The importance of this entire interaction was to create an area where I could focus solely on the task at hand. And it’s something I have carried with me in all new endeavors.
So how about you? Can you honestly say that when you get to work that you are 100% focused on the current task? If you answer no to that question, then it sounds like you need to make some changes.
Workspace
The biggest change I made was the environment that I work in. It is essential that the number of distractions is reduced to an absolute minimum when you are working on a project that requires your full attention. If you work from home, you should establish a home office that the other members of your house know is off limits. It’s inevitable that there will be the occasional interruption, but there should not be a steady parade of people into your working space.
If you work in an office, it can be a little tougher. If you have an office, you could close the door. If you’re in a cubicle in a high traffic area, ask to be relocated to a quieter area. If all else fails, try to make it known to your colleagues that you are working on a project that requires your full attention. Often times this alone will curb the distractions from coworkers.
Surfing the Web
Oh am I ever guilty of this! It’s easy to let your mouse wander over to the Firefox icon (I know those of you reading are too smart to still be using IE 
) and start browsing to your favorite blog/sports site/forums/etc. This was an enormous killer of time for me. I even downloaded a couple of programs featured on Lifehacker.com that would limit the amount of time you could browse the web. But in the end, I just decided there was a place and time for the web.
I made my realize that every time I wandered to a website when I should be working, it would take me an additional 10 minutes to get back into the flow which would be in addition to the time lost while actually reading the site! So thanks to some self discipline, my web surfing is limited to time allotted for relaxation.
Email
Internet, we have a problem with email. Email was for me the biggest time waster of all. I would be working away on a project when I would get a new email notification every few minutes. Unfortunately, I felt compelled to open and respond to every new email upon arrival. And because I would get a ton of email on a daily basis, the interruptions were enormous. This was obviously a problem, especially in an organization that used email similar to instant messaging. If an email was not responded to quickly, people wondered if I was checking my email at all.
One day in particular I decided to make a change. I vowed I was only going to check and process my email 3 times a day: 9am, noon, and 4pm. I made the rest of the staff aware of this and advised them that if there were any urgent issues to just call me. The staff was very accepting of this change and eventually led to a great system which I use to this day.
So to get yourself focused, try to incorporate the following:
- Setup your working environment in a manner that reduces distractions
- Explain to the people around you that you have a task that requires your undivided attention
- Stop wandering the web when you should be working
- Don’t treat email like an instant messenger, check it only a couple of times a day
- Stop procrastinating and get to work!
In reality, there is just so much time wasted in the corporate world today. It’s tough to place the blame squarely on the employees seeing as how we’re constantly bombarded with information from many, many mediums. It does however take some self discipline from the individual to filter out the distractions and focus on the task at hand. Usually this individual is the one who rises to the top.