Productivity Attacks
Most of you set the intention of what you’re going to get accomplished each day; with to-do lists, planners, online calendars or task management softwares. When you start your day and focus on each item and it’s a very satisfying feeling to start checking things off, and then here it comes – the surprise attacks that quite literally have come to murder your productivity. It comes in many forms; clients, employees, spouses, children, social media just to name a few.
So many moments of every single day our focus is tested and all day we have to be prepared for these attacks on our productivity in order to get through our to-do’s and projects. How do you stay focused when so many distractions keep you from being productive? One simple solution, establish a “Closed Door Policy”. This means literally and figuratively close your door, close your unneeded open windows on your computer, turn off your ringer.
By establishing these boundaries when needed, you can turn the tables on these productivity attacks. Closing your office door and putting maybe even putting a literal DO NOT DISTURB sign out will remind others that you aren’t to be interrupted. This also works great even if you don’t have an actual door, you will be surprised that if you work in a cubicle or the kitchen table how powerful this could be. When my daughter was young, I used a simple red and green construction paper that was on the side of my desk that was in the living room indicating to her whether I could be interrupted or not.
Open windows, how many do you really need to have when you’re working on one project or task? Getting distracted by email pop ups or social media is so easy that often we never actually make it back to what we were working on the same day! One tool to help you with this is one our entire team uses called Shift https://tryshift.com/referral/e/5687/bibi.goldstein/, it’s a platform that allows you to open one window and use all of your programs in one place.
Dinging and ringing of devices affect our productivity more than any other because we can take most of them anywhere with us. The distractions now come with us in the form of calls, text messages, emails, social media notifications all on one little phone.
The good news is that there are ways to combat these attacks and keep your productivity moving in the right direction.
