“So, what did you do at the weekend?” begins the water cooler conversation. It can feel like some welcome downtime from your intense workload during a busy day, but time flies and, 15 minutes later, you realize that you’re late for a meeting with your manager. And the stress returns.<\/p>
Sometimes, it seems as though our workplaces have been designed to break our focus. Even when you’re “snowed under” with work, you’ll still likely check your emails<\/a> regularly, read customers’ Twitter comments, or \u2013 even though your manager would disapprove \u2013 surf the internet for cheap vacation flights.<\/p> Dr Gloria Mark, Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, says that distractions such as these are both stressful and costly. She’s found that it takes an average of 23 minutes<\/a> for a person to fully regain his or her focus on a task after being distracted. [1]<\/p> The Overload Research Group \u2013 a collection of academic and corporate researchers dedicated to reducing the amount of information that people have to deal with \u2013 has found that U.S. workers waste about 25 percent of their time dealing with “an incessant stream of data,” losing their employers a staggering $997 billion a year<\/a>. [2]<\/p> In this article, we’ll identify the 10 most common distractions that we face at work, and examine strategies for managing them, or even eliminating them altogether.<\/p>