Over-worked?
Are you constantly staying up late and working on the weekends to get your work done? It’s not because there’s just too much work to be done. It’s because when you are actually “working”, you’re not getting enough done! The reason for this is pretty simple, the reason is interruptions.
I personally get the majority of my work done either late at night or early in the morning. Some days it’s 1am-5am and other days it’s 5am-10am, before my roommates get up and go to work or before I start having meetings. It’s no coincidence that these are the times when nobody else is around and bothering me. Do you feel the same way?
Think about this for a minute, 2pm is typically when people are in meetings or answering e-mails or chatting with colleagues. According to corporate america, I realize that this is considered “work”, but in reality nothing is getting done. As a business owner, you’re probably familiar with the taps on the shoulder and little get-togethers that happen throughout the day. These may seem harmless, but they are ruining your productivity.
This doesn’t mean that talking with your colleagues is a bad idea and you should stop it, because you shouldn’t. However, you need to start dedicating chunks of time that can be your “alone-time” or “work-time” where you have zero interruptions. Think about how interruptions are affecting your day, here’s a sample calendar that may or may not be similar to yours.
10:00 am: start working
10:45 am: a call
11:00 am: back to work
11:15 am: interrupted by e-mail from colleague
12:00 pm: lunch
1:00 pm: meeting
2:00 pm: work
2:30 pm: another interruption
etc, etc.
This goes on until about 5pm when you realize that you’ve only actually gotten about an hour’s worth of work done during the day. When you get interrupted, you can’t get work done. You can’t get anything truly meaningful done because you’re constantly going start,stop,start,stop.
Get into the alone zone
Long stretches of alone time have proven to be the best for productivity, anywhere from 2 to 4 hours of focused attention. When you don’t have to mind-shift in between various different tasks, you can actually focus on things and get shit done. (Think about when the internet goes off at work or on a plane and you go into super-productivity mode)
Getting into the alone zone isn’t easy. It’s similar to trying to jump right into REM sleep as soon as you close your eyes to sleep. You can’t go directly to REM, you go to sleep first and then make your way to REM. Interruptions make you start over and it isn’t until REM when you get the true benefits, the same is true with alone zone productivity.
The great thing about this is that you don’t have to have your alone zone at 2am. You can schedule it at 10am-2pm for all I care. It truly is up to you, you just need to let your colleagues and business associates know that they are not to e-mail, call or interrupt you until after you are done with your alone-time. You can do this at the first half of the day or the last, it is up to you and when you feel you will be the most productive.
Make sure this period of time is completely un-interrupted as well. You don’t want the productivity zapping bug to hit you and kill your productive time! This means that you’re going to have to give up on your instant response facebook habit(I’ve had it too), your instant twitter @reply and constantly checking your e-mail. But, when you think about it…how often is it that your response is needed immediately? Typically things can wait at least a few hours..