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Maybe You Need a Break, PT. 1

By | April 14, 2010

Do you sometimes find yourself drifting into the world of wasted time during the work day? It could be something like following a link in your email to a newly uploaded YouTube Video of your best friends grandchild’s new dance video (and the child is only 13 months old – go figure)?

Maybe you follow a legitimate response to a post on your Facebook but instead of making a quick response, you start reading other Facebook postings for the next hour or two.

By the time you look up, you’ve wasted time doing things that have kept you totally distracted from your business goals.

Identifying Distraction Behaviors

The way to get hold of this behavior is to take control of what you do during the day. Start by finding out why and when you become distracted. Here are some steps to help.

Start by making a chart of what happens to distract you in your daily planner.

Put the time that the distraction started
What the trigger was for the distraction.
Then mark the time when you came out of your stupor and realized what you were doing.

What you’re doing is starting to recognize trigger behaviors that distract you from your goals. Charting the information isn’t to make you feel guilty. It’s to let you recognize where you need to adjust your work schedule to be more disciplined in sticking to your goals. Here’s what you’ll learn when you chart this behavior.

Are the certain times of the day when you become most distracted?
Are there certain types of events that trigger the distraction? For instance, are you more susceptible to distractions if you read an email post or if you check your Twitter account – or both?
Do you spend more time on certain distracting activities than others? For instance, are you more distracting by reading emails or Tweeting?
What makes you break the hold of distraction and come back to reality – or do you break the hold?
Is there a certain time of day when you’re more vulnerable to distractions?
Are there certain activities you’ve been doing that make you more vulnerable to distractions?

Make a chart to keep track of this information over a period of time. At least one week will be good. It’s tedious to track these details at first but it’s worth the time.

Analyzing Your Results

What you’ll find out is that you probably get most distracted when you’ve been concentrating on a task for a focused amount of time without a break. If you’ve been on one task for an hour and you get a chance to break the focus you’re giving yourself a break from the task.

What you can find out is that you might need to get better at scheduling breaks during the day to regroup, rest and revitalize yourself to stay on track.

You might find that certain times of day make you susceptible to distractions. If you have the bad habit of sitting for hours in front of the computer without taking a break, you might learn that a lot of time is actually wasted time instead of productive time.

Because you don’t give yourself a break your brain and body beg for relief. Distractions let the brain change courses, thereby giving it a “recess” from working so hard.

Instead, you might just need to schedule in a break.

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