What are the Impacts of Distractions and Stress on Productivity?
You arrive at the office at 8 am, get settled and grab some coffee, it’s now 8:15. Next you check some emails and spend some time responding and taking down action items, it’s now 8:45. You just started to focus on a critical task and at 9:15 you get a notification from your manager on Slack about something critical. So you click on the notification, chat for a while and address the concern. Over 30 minutes have passed (9:45) and finally, you’re back in the flow of the critical task that needs to get done before a meeting at 1 pm. Just as you’re making progress, a colleague stops by for a chat at 10:15, most of it is not critical and could have been an email. That’s another 20 minutes (10:35) that have passed before you find your train of thought again on the task you’ve been trying to complete throughout the morning. Just as you’re making progress, you get a notification for a meeting with your team at 11. So now, you will need to work through lunch to get the critical task completed before the 1 pm meeting. This is not an atypical example of how our work functions today. Between open office floor plans and non stop notifications on our laptops and phones - where everything feels urgent, making progress on tasks that require our full focus become harder and harder to complete.
If this example produced some anxiety or stress as you read it, then you have most likely experienced a similar scenario. These distractions and the stress that is produced in the process have a tremendous impact on our productivity. In this post, we will explore multi-tasking, the cost of task switching, and how this can contribute to overall stress and impacts to productivity.
The cost of multi-tasking and productivity
How do you know when you’ve been productive? While there is some qualitative measures to productivity, it also carries a lot of subjectivity for office related careers. Productivity is about deliveries of an output, but there are many elements to an output. During the industrial revolution, it was clear what the output needed to be, a widget at the end of the factory line. In our time of information revolution, two people doing the same job can get to the results in different ways and the quality of the result can vary greatly as well depending on so many factors. A few elements have a significant impact on our productivity and quality of our output:
The amount of stress a person feels. According to Rozina Lakhani, MD, MPH, author with The American Institute of Stress and a psychiatrist, a survey reported that 80% of employees report feeling stressed at work with 60% of absenteeism being associated with forms of stress. [1]
The amount of time we are interrupted while working. Wendy Cole, author of an article with Time magazine, writes that on average an employee is interrupted 56 times per day, with 80% of those interruptions being trivial. These interruptions not only take away the time during interruptions, but cost us time to refocus on the task we were working on prior to the interruption. [2]
According to a study conducted by UC Irvine, it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to refocus on a task after an interruption! Add this time with the interruption and easily that time adds up to 30 minutes or more of wasted time, especially when we consider that 80% of interruptions are trivial. [3]
The amount of time we are “multi-tasking”. John White, program director at Priority Management, shares that "We pride ourselves on being multitaskers, but the truth is, we're functioning at a state of partial attention, because of constant interruptions, our memory, follow-up ability, flexibility and quality of work start to erode." [2]
It was startling to read these facts, but even from experience, I can attest the impacts seem to be accurate to me. As a someone who worked in professional services, I recall being in back to back meetings for most of the day and being pinged through IM and expected to both run the meeting I was hosting and answer these notifications as something critical might come up. The only time I could do some focus work was during the evenings, often from 8 pm to midnight, and even during these hours it was normal to connect with colleagues through IM or even meetings (it was one of the best times to connect with off-shore colleagues). In this hyper connected work environment, how do we find some alone time to do deep focus work and produce quality work?
Go offline more often
It can often feel uncomfortable to not be “available” or appear unavailable on IM, through email, or text. However, during certain hours, whether it’s during the working hours or after, keep some time for when you are truly offline and unreachable. This time can be used to do actual focused work, that can produce truly quality deliverables that you create with efficiency, with reduced stress, and better retention of what you learn in the process. This boundary might be hard to set in some work setting such as professional services, which is driven by the client schedule. However, we should practice setting these boundaries so that we can actually produce quality deliverables to those clients. Here are some points to consider and steps that can help to create these boundaries:
Discuss with your team about these boundaries so that there are true focus hours for all team members and times when meetings can be scheduled. Have a team agreement on this topic. Some companies will keep Fridays as meeting free as possible with very few exceptions. Can your team adopt such practices? If not, what’s the cost to productivity for the team? Can you quantify this number so that leadership can understand the type of impact this has to work?
Respect other people’s offline and focus schedules. When working on something that needs to be delivered, we often will ignore others’ schedules so that we can get to the finish line. We will ping them with urgency and expect a response immediately. This creates a terrible cycle and creates all the elements we discussed in the previous section. So consider defining what is urgent and send an email instead for topics that can wait for a response.
Define what is urgent
Define what urgent really means for your team. Some leaders actually will demand urgency on their requests because they are in a critical meeting where they need some piece of information and instead of saying they will follow up, they will ping the team members to get the information on the spot and interrupt the work that team member was focused on completing. This causes all the cascading events that this article started with. As a leader, how can you better define what is urgent and what can wait a few hours or days? How can you engage with your teams in ways that helps them keep their focus and also follow up appropriately on urgent matters? What frameworks can you set in place to make this happen? How can you influence your company culture to better respect focus hours and reduce the interruptions we have discussed? Not everything is urgent and having clear definitions will help you and your team to find focus that can generate quality outputs.
Create simple systems and frameworks for sharing information
There are so many ways to share information, there’s confluence, shared drives, google docs, and countless other tools. In some ways, we can have very complex systems of sharing information. How can your team simplify how information is shared and categorized so that team members can actually find the information they are looking for instead of constantly relying on others to give them the information? How can you standardize how information is gathered and then shared? What templates might be helpful for the team to follow? How can you standardize meetings so that agendas are set ahead of time and it’s clear what outcome is expected and shared with the right team members? We are often focused on efficiencies in business processes, but sometimes focusing on how we do the work (meetings, notes, emails, IMs) and improving these practices can be more impactful to improving overall productivity, reducing stress, and producing quality outputs.
Conclusion
In this post, we shared the impacts of distractions on productivity and on stress. We discussed the critical cost of multitasking and distractions on productivity and stress. By honoring offline schedules, defining what is truly urgent, and creating simple systems and frameworks on how information is shared, we can allow our teams to have true focus time so that they can make progress on critical tasks and produce quality results. As a leader, you can use the questions raised in this post to explore how work is done and how you can champion processes, practices, and a work culture that helps your team to be productive and reduce stress.
Sources
Boyd, D. (2020, January 15). SEVEN WAYS to DODGE JOB STRESS - the American Institute of Stress. The American Institute of Stress. https://www.stress.org/seven-ways-to-dodge-job-stress
Please, go away. (2004, October 3). TIME.com. https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,709054,00.html
Mark, Gloria & Gudith, Daniela & Klocke, Ulrich. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. 107-110. 10.1145/1357054.1357072.
