Distractions - How To Overcome Them - Part 7

Time Management and Distractions

After working intensely for hours on an arduous task, do you feel prone to respond to the first thing that grasps for your attention, no matter how unimportant?

Some tasks are long, painstaking and tedious.  So much so that you welcome any degree of distractions that come your way. Also, just as any voluntary muscle, the human brain gets exhausted by concentrated application especially when the task is dull and uninteresting. A break eases this fatigue. The human brain works best with a break after 90 minutes of work with its peak focus for about 45 minutes. I recommended that you do three 90-minute units of work in 8 hours for best productivity.

What happens if you do go beyond the recommended 90 minute time chunk? Two things happen. First, your productivity diminishes quite sharply. Second, you are an easy target for any distraction that comes your way no matter how miniscule it may be.

Let us say that you are laboring on a job expected to take about 4 hours to complete. After you work intensely on it for 90 minutes, your focus will fade so much so that you will become susceptible to interruptions. At this stage, you may end up with something that you don't really want to do and you wouldn't allow yourself to be distracted by under better circumstances. However, because you are fatigued of the chore at hand, you may end up with such a distraction.

What is the alternative? The choice is to intentionally sidetrack yourself.  Here is how it works:

1. Make a list of short tasks (10-15 minutes). This is the "deliberate distractions" list.

2. Set a timer for 75 minutes

3. After the timer’s alarm goes off, bring the main job to a reasonable pause, i.e. a safe state to be interrupted. Make a note of all the things that would permit you to resume the task easily.

4. Take a 20 minute break

5. Complete one of the tasks on your list of deliberate distractions.

6. Restart the 75 minute timer and resume the main task.

This is a very powerful tool to control brain fatigue.  Try these steps to eliminate the distractions from your everyday work activities.

**Just a side note... Many of us are parents, so I don’t want to just cover distractions in dealing with adults. Many of our children have issues with distractions also.  So, Join me Sunday for an extra segment on helping children to limit distractions too.

Until then... stay focused.