While you are sitting at your desk, working your 9:00 am to 5:00 pm job, how much time have you lost being unproductive? How did you get back on track after your break from the monotonous tasks? According to a Career Builder survey, three out of four employers believe that their employees waste at least 2 hours of their workday. Some of the distractions range anywhere from cellphone use, gossip, meetings, and smoke breaks.
What are Your Work Distractions?
At Nextfly Web Design, our largest distraction seems to be each other. As a smaller tight-knit company, we are constantly bouncing ideas and questions off of one another. We even ask for help when we are having issues with projects that we are currently working on.
While we do not think that we are being distracted, since we are trying to find answers to a question we may have, we are indeed distracting our co-workers. While our coworkers are assisting us with our issues, they are not able to complete the tasks that they may have. How do we solve this dilemma for our peers? Before reaching out to one of our many peers, we can spend time researching the topic that we are confused about. We are able to find almost all of the information needed with the resources around us, like the Internet. I cannot tell you how many questions a quick Google search has answered for me.
Another distraction that we face at our web design company is focusing TOO hard on a topic. Our content writers spend hours upon hours, days upon days writing pages and blogs for topics that they may not have been as familiar with as their clients are. This causes the writers to spend time a lot of researching topics/companies that they are writing for. This at times may cause a bit of writer’s block if they have multiple pages to write in a short time frame.
What We Do To Break Up Our Day
During the days that writer’s block hits hard, our content writers, project managers, and developers do what they can to clear their minds of all the clutter. This helps when they are trying to refocus on the project that they need to work on. Some of the ways our team chooses to break up the day are ten to fifteen-minute walks. On the days of less than perfect weather, it makes sitting in your cubicle writing overly difficult. A few team members also play a little mini-golf through the office and they may even hop on the syboard for a cruise. These small activities help recharge the mind to prepare you for the long hours of work ahead!
When you work your next 40-hour week, take a close look at how you spend your days. Do you spend the majority of your day researching cute kitten videos, or catching up on the latest Kim K Drama? Think about the ways that you can refocus your attention on the task at hand. Even better, think of ways that you can productively focus your attention. Even little activities such as walking can give you a more stress-free mindset. You may even get all of your projects done faster than you usually do!