“When you get distracted at work, you lose valuable room,” said Irvine, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Irvine studied the consequences of distraction and the negative behaviors that come with it, and found that distracting interruptions are often caused by unreasonable bosses, chatty coworkers, and often self-sabotage.
While these negative situations that we will list below have the potential to put you in very difficult situations at work, they can also help you get out of such negative situations. Let’s take a look at the situations that will negatively affect your performance at work.
- Being busy with a personal phone at work at every opportunity
“The biggest mistake most of my clients make when they’re sitting at their desk is that they keep their phone with them all the time,” says time management coach Anna Dearmon Kornick. “If they have to wait for 1-2 seconds or 1-2 minutes while they’re working on something, they’re on their phone and it’s costing them an extra 10 to 15 minutes.” With this statement, Kornick points to the distraction of employees fiddling with their phones at every opportunity, which has a very negative effect on attention and time management and harms the person. In such a situation, the best option is not to engage in any other distracting activity when you have to wait, and patiently manage those small periods of time carefully.
- Lying to yourself that “it will only take a few seconds”
Pointing to the negative consequences of doing unnecessary tasks at your workplace with the mentality of “it will only take me a few seconds”, Kornick says, “One moment you are diligently performing a task and the next you find yourself shopping online, writing a grocery list, making a phone call for a dinner reservation and forgetting everything you need to do.” In fact, you are dealing with irrelevant things much more than a few seconds.
He emphasizes that you can take care of such non-work tasks outside your working hours with a to-do list so that you can continue your working time without interruption.
- Keeping too many website pages open
Some tabs have requirements that will help you concentrate on your work, while others have completely different content that will attract your attention, which inevitably leads you to examine them and thus to a situation that causes you to lose both your attention and your time. The recommendation for this situation is to immediately close irrelevant tabs other than the tabs related to your work and get rid of such a negative situation easily…
- Impulsively checking Slack and other business chat platforms
Let’s say you are not so distracted that you do not engage in other unnecessary activities unrelated to work. Even in such a case, you are still not free from distraction and time loss, because even constantly checking the business communication programs that you are involved in because of your job can lead to serious time loss and poor performance. “Similar to text messaging, the urge to view incoming updates develops, and this repetitive habit can interrupt focus big time and lead to scattered brains,” says life coach Shanita Liu.
- Trying to be a hero
You’re at work, you’re working calmly and nicely, but what?! Suddenly there’s a problem that needs to be solved immediately and you’re scrambling to solve it; sorry. Sometimes, the solution to a problem that is not your task is not only a waste of your time, but also a waste of time in a structure that will steal your time, and it will not be in an adequate way because it is not intervened by the expert. In such cases, in order to avoid time loss and performance problems, you need to ask yourself these questions about what the problem is, how much it concerns you, and how useful you will be when you are involved in the situation. If the solution to the problem is beyond you or if it prevents you from doing your own responsibilities, it is better to stay away.
- “I am always right” aphorisms
One of the biggest downsides for people who work with this kind of approach is a lack of progress and incompatible social relationships due to a lack of empathy. Accepting that you can never be completely right allows you to listen to advice and counsel based on your potential mistakes, while keeping your social relationships at reasonable levels. Error is a human concept and therefore it would be a big mistake to think that anyone, including yourself, can be infallible. In such a case, you should face your own mistakes and the consequences of your mistakes and take advice to correct them. No one looks favorably on anyone who doesn’t look down their nose, who doesn’t bow their head because of their mistakes. Take it from us…
- Unnecessary meetings and gatherings
In a 2012 survey conducted by Salary.com, 47% of workers said that too many meetings were the top workplace distraction. As meeting researcher Steven G. Rogelberg previously told HuffPost, “One of the things I advocate for is for a leader to be able to think of their agenda not necessarily as issues, but as questions that need to be answered.” Repetitive meetings that don’t work, or even if they do work, have a very negative effect in terms of distracting and even taking time away from the task at hand.
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