The "Smart Distractions" at workplace

Productive environment is one of the important ingredient in growth path of most of the organizations or any individual even. The companies usually start making handsome profit & grow exponentially through the best possible progress of productive people with experience & expertise. The uninterrupted & clear focus could be one of the important tool to achieve the best productivity measures from the teams with effective output and maximum throughput.

The Distractions usually have a significant impact on Productivity, rather they kill the productivity sometimes, ending up making unrestful situations in achieving the project timelines, but somehow they have been becoming part of our daily life activities in a "Smart" enough way we just never know ourselves even sometimes, specially with employees working in IT/Software companies. The productivity in right direction could be boosted-up if the distractions at workplace could be minimized. The source of distractions could be many, but the distractions created through the Smartphones these days could have a big contribution in it, called the "Smart Distractions", which I would be focusing today.

IMPACTS OF DISTRACTIONS

Distractions are Expensive: If an average distraction magnitude is just 1 hour per resource per day, as a result of focus-out & context switching (by answering quick phone calls / responding short messages right away / social media notifications etc.), it would be producing significant productivity loss of around 10 man days effort per day, which is a big deal, scaling it with 80 employees company and so on.

Distractions can be Deadly: The overall impact of a distraction followed by bringing the work context back could be high e.g. specially a phone call(s) during a meeting, as it can distract the focus of everyone else in the meeting resulting in a multiplied "smart" waste of time, and meeting objectives may not be concluded within the scheduled time-slot, and could be rescheduled. Similarly a distraction could be a fatal in case developer is debugging the project code to identify & reproduce a critical production issue reported by customer etc. resulting in the loss of whole debugging effort & to start it again from scratch.

Distractions are Unethical: It looks highly unethical to me to give precedence to a person calling me on the phone (wants to talk to me right now) over the person(s) I'm already talking to in a meeting. This can build up an unethical culture in the organization i.e. distractions (or the person making this distraction) are considered more important than the project team/deliverable. It would also be unethical to let everyone know & get distracted due to the incoming phone call on my phone because of its noisy notification while they are working on their own assigned task in development hall.

Distractions crash performance: The "welcome-to-all-distractions" attitude (e.g. by putting cell phone on the table or holding it in the hand) usually comes up with the lesser productive & inefficient focus on work, since implicitly through this attitude we are telling everyone that “Smart Distractions are more important than work to me”. This pattern could be dangerous enough that it can enable the teams to pull the concentration out each time & to listen to every noise immediately (even other than Smart Distractions) during working hours, resulting in lack of overall performance and producing pressure in project timelines. We think of ourselves to receive “always-urgent” notifications which is not always true.

POSSIBLE FIXES:

Manage: The working model could be grown up in a way like the Smart Distractions (e.g. phone calls, social media notifications, messages etc.) could be managed to address with their required attentions in non-productive hours e.g. lunch/coffee breaks or after the day-off to make a win-win situation.

Mute: Incoming calls should notify Me Only, the smart phone must be kept on Mute to avoid making distraction for everyone. Furthermore, the different notifications settings in respective phone’s profiles can also help to mute the unnecessary distractions during work hours. A use of a smartwatch to filter out unnecessary notification could also help better.

Set Expectations: Not each & every incoming call is urgent, so we can have kind-of [AutoReply] message templates (e.g. "I am in the meeting, will talk after around 1 hour" etc.) through rejecting the call with it, and to set the expectations of the caller about my busy time-slot & potential time to speak again with required focus.

Differentiate: Build-up a way with the contacts (family, friends etc.) so that normal distraction & emergency situations/urgent notifications could be clearly differentiated and responded accordingly e.g. immediate 2nd/3rd call try or dropping a message right after the call etc. are not normal distractions and so on.

Note: Urgent Emergencies, Project Communications & Exceptions are alwyas Excluded.