Struggling to maintain focus at work? You're not alone. The culprit might not be your lack of discipline, but rather, your workplace environment. Let's delve into the reasons why your office might be hampering your productivity.
Deep Work
On average, employees who do the majority of their work on computers are distracted once every ten and a half minutes
- Voluntarily switching from one task to the next without finishing the original task first accounted for a full 44% of work interruptions
- Cal Newport argues that deep work – the kind of difficult tasks that draw upon all your mental reserves and require singular focus – is both increasingly important and increasingly rare in the modern workplace
Make asynchronous communication the default
Asynchronous communication – sending messages without the expectation of an immediate response – can free your team to disconnect fully to focus on their work and reconnect later to respond
- Make it clear to your team that delayed responses are acceptable
- Switch from a group chat app like Slack to a communication tool like Twist
Why should companies and leaders care?
Attention acts more like molasses than water; you can redirect it, but a sticky “attention residue” stays behind
- If your attention is divided, it’s harder to get things done
- Constant interruptions negatively impact both sides of the equation, causing unnecessary stress and making it difficult to make meaningful progress
Have the team list the single most important thing they want to complete each day
Identify the one thing that they believe will have the biggest impact instead of listing everything that needs to be done.
- This will help form the habit of always thinking about what work would have the most impact and discourage getting sidetracked by shallower work.
- It’s difficult to prioritize when everything seems important and urgent.
Focus: A dwindling resource in the workplace
Constant task switching has practically become a requirement at the job
- Open office floor plans supposedly create moments of serendipitous collaboration
- Workers continue to spend an average of six hours on email a day
- Meetings, the corporate pastime that everyone loves to hate, still take up 15% of companies’ time, on average
- Real-time group chat is arguably even worse because it requires constant presence throughout the workday
- The move toward real-time chat is perhaps the fastest and most dramatic shift in the way we work ever
- Each additional interruption comes at a price in lost productivity and increased stress
Limit email/group chat before a certain time in the morning
Mornings tend to be the best time for focused, hard work when we’re fresh and haven’t hit decision fatigue yet.
- Have your team experiment with waiting until 10am or even noon before checking their email.
Ambition & Balance Delivered
A short mental checklist for disagreeing in a way that will earn you respect
What companies can (and should) do about it
The growing amount of research into workplace interruptions suggests that the few companies who help their employees focus deeply for extended periods of time on difficult tasks are the ones that will get ahead in the long-term.
- How do you get there?
- Charles Duhigg encourages leaders to think about any group behavioral change through the lens of organizational habits – routines that people learn over time based on the rewards within their environment.
Set a max quota for total meeting time company-wide
This will give your team the opportunity to rethink which meetings are necessary and which could be moved to written communication or just nixed altogether
- Start measuring and setting goals for lowering the total amount of time your team spends in meetings
