Distractive Activities That Could Affect Your Team's Productivity At The Workplace

By Author: James Vargas
Total Articles: 3
Comment this article

The noise of the printing machine, whispers at the coffee machine, sounds of the email notifications, corporate offices are full of distractions which one or the other way has the power to grab the attention of the employees.

Blotting out these distractions in one or the other way will have a great effect on your work life. It will help you give some mental peace and thus improve your productivity and concentration.

So while you are planning and finding ways to do your work more efficiently, consider the following distractions that are to be avoided during your work time which is surely a time waster to affect your productivity.

>> Unacceptable small breaks

The concept of taking a 10 minutes break after every certain interval of time is taken very seriously by some of the corporate workers. The belief that this break improves productivity makes them take the breaks more than necessary.

Some corporate workers stretch the lunch break by a few minutes, some frequently take the smoke or tea breaks. These unacceptable number of breaks tend to make these people less focused as they need at ...
... least 20 minutes after the break to get back to the flow of work they have left before going on their breaks.

The effect of these breaks is seen at the end of the day when either the employees have to sit for an extra hour to complete the assigned task or have to keep them undone to be completed for the next day.

>> Unnecessary daily procedures

The next thing that proves to be a complete time-waster for the corporate office worker is the tiring procedures that they need to follow every day. The small things that sometimes matter and sometimes prove to be futile, like filling the excel sheets with your timings and mentioning about your work update in every software that the company has, or having different groups to reply for each task assigned to you.

These small things count a very little time to be given, but when calculated as a whole consumes much of a person's day time, which sometimes hinders the work-flow set by him/her or the agenda/ target set by a person to complete.

>> Noisy office and clutter environment

Corporate offices mostly are kept very silent and decent to give a better environment for the people working to perform their best. But there are some companies with employees having a free culture to talk and wander around in the cubical to have their space for work.

Having such a work culture is great to have, but when this open culture starts becoming a distraction for the other in the room, it surely becomes a matter of discussion for the management. Like having some talkative colleagues around who are discussing their project in a louder voice, or someone reading and speaking the messages so that everyone around can listen to it and have some fun.

A dirty and unorganized workplace can also act as a great factor of distraction as it would continuously grab the attention of not being in the right place.

>> Overstretched and pointless meetings

Project meetings are held for the people in the team to understand the work process and the next agenda to be achieved by the team. These meetings are meant to give clarity to the people working on the project, but what makes it as a time-waster is when the topic of discussion in the meeting gets off tracked and the discussion is stretched for an hour or two.

Many times the agenda for which the team was gathered for the meeting is not even mentioned in the discussion and thus is ended without any conclusion to work on it further. It also happens that the time of one team is wasted due to other team meetings, as they have to unnecessarily be present in the meetings that are not meant for them.

>> Unclear tasks

People lose interest in doing the things that they are unclear about. Like if a person is not clear about what he has to do about the work given to him or the output that is expected from him at the end of the day, he has to spend half of the time understanding it and researching about what the task actually meant rather than thinking about how it can be accomplished.

This unclarity gives unacceptable results and thus has to be redone by the person. Another thing that can distract a person is the sudden assignment of a task. This undefined task breaks the predefined flow of work and thus affects its delivery time acting as a distraction to the workflow.

>> Mobiles phones and social media

The last and the most common distraction that everyone in the office has is his/her mobile phone. Whether it's a young worker of the office or the middle-aged person, the habit of checking the phone at every 15-30 minutes of working is normal. This normal habit affects the work when the duration of using the mobile phone and attending people on social media increases more than needed.

The best solution to this could be keeping the notification popups off or just keeping your phone aside and deciding to take it only after a certain when your agenda for the time is completed. Doing this will help you get less focused on what is happening in the outer world and also increase the speed of doing things in the need of checking the phone once the task gets over.

Summing Up

Being a human its not possible to keep yourself 100% attentive and full of productivity all time, distractions are bound to come and so is the need for it to be controlled by understanding it and adopting the ways to minimize these distractions.

The above-mentioned time wasters are the reasons that prevent people to remain focused on the real work and thus creates stress of things getting not completed on time. Makes sure you try to avoid them while you plan your work, as this could help you improve your efficiency and reduce your effort to keep yourself concentrated.

Author Bio:

James Vargas is an experienced business expert, consultant, and manager at Get Everything Delivered, startup consulting services. With the 1.5-decade corporate experience, he is now sharing his guidance to start-ups to grow with corporate team building activities and project delivery solutions.