Carrie-Ann Barrow specializes in coaching leaders & organizations, helping them achieve their boldest visions of success. Scaling Strategies
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Whether you’re a manager, employee or entrepreneur, avoiding distraction and remaining focused during business hours is essential to your productivity and the value you can bring to an organization.
Many think that this primarily involves minimizing the outside influences that interrupt our day—activities like attending meetings and answering questions from colleagues feel like they pull us out of our workflow and cause a loss of productivity. But in reality, it is our reaction to those interruptions that can distract us and cause our biggest productivity loss.
While you can do a lot to limit the interruptions you must face in your daily work life, it's simply impossible to eliminate them completely. Thus, until you are equipped with the tools necessary to identify and avoid distraction, your overall productivity loss is bound to continue.
Identifying Distractions
Most of the time, our distractions are fairly easy to identify—we all know that scrolling social media and tracking sports scores qualify as distractions. But what happens when our distractions look almost identical to our work?
For instance, suppose a project requires some research, so you head to the internet to gather information. The most efficient use of your time would be to find the necessary information and return to your project. If instead of returning to the project, you continue to fall down the proverbial research "rabbit hole," gathering more and more information that is ultimately unnecessary to the task at hand, you’ve become distracted. As you’re gathering information, it’s worthwhile to check in with yourself every few minutes and ask whether you need to continue digging.
Or suppose an employee or client comes to you with a problem that you know how to fix. Many of us, especially those who value helping others, might take their problem on as a secondary task for ourselves and solve it for them. While this might feel like "doing your job," in reality, you may have gotten distracted by a task you didn’t actually need to complete. Could you explain to your employee or client how to solve the problem themself or perhaps direct them to someone whose job it is to solve said problem? If so, you’re likely getting distracted from what you should actually be doing.
Your time is valuable, and you should use it to complete your high-value tasks instead of taking on tasks of lesser value. Start your workday by asking yourself what your high-value tasks are for that day—what sorts of things you and only you can accomplish to yield a maximum return on your time investment. Write them down, then check on them throughout the day. Set timers or leave notes around that remind you to ask yourself whether you are working on your high-value tasks. If you can’t answer yes, you’re distracted.
Avoiding Distractions
It’s not enough, however, to just identify distractions. You also need impulse control to avoid them. How do we become the sort of people who vigilantly deny distraction and maintain focus and productivity? Interestingly, some helpful tips might come to us not from the business world, but from the world of dog training.
If you’ve ever interacted with dogs, you know that they are especially prone to distraction. Dogs who are perfectly well-behaved in their nice, quiet homes often struggle to obey their owners when out for walks or in new environments. In these unpredictable, unknown environments, the dog’s heightened sense of smell floods its brain with an abundance of stimuli that can cause it to forget even its most rudimentary training. Thus, much of dog training involves teaching the animals to avoid distraction.
In an article for the American Kennel Club, certified professional dog trainer Stephanie Gibeault suggests that we can train dogs to avoid distraction by matching rewards to distraction levels. She explains, "You need to offer your dog a better choice. Dogs repeat rewarding behaviors, so if sniffing the tree trunk and ignoring you is more rewarding than coming when called, your dog will choose the tree trunk every time." Thus, training a dog to avoid distraction is all about associating distraction avoidance with positive outcomes—outcomes that offer more enjoyment than the distraction can provide.
While humans are not dogs, this idea for distraction avoidance stems from the Premack principle, which psychologists have been using for years to analyze human behavior. The Premack principle states that we can use desirable behaviors to reinforce undesirable behaviors. Hopefully, you have more impulse control than a dog, but if this principle helps them resist distraction, why shouldn’t it help you, too?
Use Rewards To Conquer Distractions
Perhaps the reward you could offer yourself is simply small breaks throughout your day—try giving yourself five minutes to relax after you’ve completed half an hour of totally undistracted work. Perhaps you could keep a record of your week and reward yourself with a nice meal or a fun activity at the end of an especially productive work week. Or perhaps simply the promise of future success is enough to motivate you to avoid distraction in the day-to-day. If the goal feels too big or unattainable, scale it back until it’s manageable and then work up from there.
Just like our beloved canine companions, we can often become overstimulated and lose focus on the tasks at hand. Sometimes this distraction is obvious, but more often it arises despite our best intentions. Ask yourself throughout your day whether you’re focused on your high-value tasks, and reward yourself when you find that the answer is a consistent yes. You’ll soon find it easier and easier to avoid distraction.
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