Whether you work from home or are a salesman, a manager, or a small business owner, learning how to deal with distractions may be one of the most important skills you acquire. Every workplace has its own unique distractions, and most have the usual suspects:
- water cooler gossip
- internet/emailing
- cell phones/texting
- loud coworkers
Chris Yeh, a Harvard Business School grad, writes:
Learning how to deal with distractions is every bit as important to your business as learning to sell. If distractions cost you just one hour per business day, that’s over 250 hours per year, or six full 40-hour weeks. Think you could use the additional income from an extra six weeks of work per year? Or: would you want to take an extra six weeks of vacation per year?
Interestingly, most workers lose 2 hours a day to distraction, not 1. That’s 12 weeks per year per employee. A bit unsettling to say the least. Unfortunately, most distracted workers don’t realize how distracted they really are. And if they do, they are ill-equipped to deal with it, assuming that it’s an inevitable part of work.
Are distractions really inevitable? Yeh suggests three possible (and amusing) courses of action:
- Run
- Hide
- Fight
These options allow you to either avoid or face distractions head-on, but they assume a work from home environment. Since most workers still commute to work, let’s look at another option: sound-masking. With the addition of low-level background white noise, sound masking can be easily installed in your office’s ceiling tiles and evenly distributed throughout your office.
The long and short of it is that most employees won’t choose to deal with distraction on their own, either out of hopelessness, fear, or apathy. The result is billions of dollars lost every year to pretty easily resolved distractions. Many businesses have turned to sound masking for resolving office noise issues. Have you considered what your business could do with more productivity?