Most people encounter frequent interruptions, most of which adversely affect productivity.
Basex (an IT research & consulting firm) found in their research sometime back that an estimated 28 billion man-hours are lost per annum in the US, costing an estimated $588 billion USD a year in losses for the US Government.
In a study from the University of California Irvine, researchers shadowed workers on the job, studying their productivity. Here’s what study lead Gloria Mark told Fast Company of the findings: You have to completely shift your thinking, it takes you a while to get into it and it takes you a while to get back and remember where you were…We found about 82 percent of all interrupted work is resumed on the same day. But here’s the bad news — it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.
Interruptions are detrimental, not only to productivity but also to job satisfaction, employee morale, and life balance. They lead to a loss of energy, enthusiasm, and loss of momentum.
Interruptions fall into the following three categories:
– External Interruptions: include phone calls, emails, meeting people in hallways.
– Internal Interruptions: where you interrupt yourself by checking sports scores, celebrity gossip, daydreaming or thinking about the past or future.
– Interrupting Others: when you interrupt others.
Some interruptions, albeit few, are positive – these are ones which help you achieve your goals faster.
Given such high costs of interruptions, one may ask how we control them?
Here are a dozen ways to better manage interruptions:
1. Understand what these interruptions are and whether they are really necessary. Keeping a log recording different types of interruptions helps you understand and course correct.
2. Schedule routine meetings and tell your team in advance to prepare a running list of things to cover. This way you can attend to all the respective individual needs in one scheduled interruption, instead of several interruptions. Scheduling routine meetings prevents people from interrupting because they know they will be meeting you soon. They will only interrupt if something cannot wait until the scheduled meeting time.
3. Communicate your schedule to your workgroup so everyone knows when they can interrupt you.
4. Block out periods of time during the day for interruptions so to get uninterrupted time to complete your own priorities. Create available and unavailable time to balance your day. Master your own mind to avoid daydreaming and thinking of the past/future or getting diverted to read gossip or sports reviews.
5. Incorporating flex time and accepting/expecting interruptions allows you to plan for them and be better prepared to deal with them effectively and efficiently.
6. Voicemail lets people leave messages for you, thus avoiding phone call interruptions.
7. Taking time to reflect before firefighting minimizes long interruptions as most things are not as urgent as they appear.
8. Informing the disturber that you have a tight deadline to meet prevents the interruption. Alternatively, give only specific time (example 5 minutes) while standing with a stopwatch to make people get to the point quickly.
9. Work away from the office for some period of the day to avoid interruption and enhance your productivity.
10. Delegate or postpone interruption requests that are not a priority.
11. Personalize the cost – how much is it costing you personally to be interrupted?
12. Enhance positive interruptions by design – positive interruptions are those which help you reach your goals faster. Devote any surplus time saved from interruptions to key priorities that have the highest impact.
Succumbing to an interruption in itself is not the culprit. Moreso, it is what you get interrupted for, as well as how and when you get interrupted.
However, no matter what, do not panic. Instead, start fresh to avoid interrupting your own success!