Limit your daily interruptions

Phones, email alerts, chatty co-workers—the list of daily interruptions is almost endless. And once interrupted, studies show that it’s very difficult to get back on task.

So a better strategy is to try and avoid the interruptions as much as possible during the workday. Here are some suggestions for keeping your workday working:

• Arrive earlier than everyone else if you have a flexible work schedule. Try to arrive an hour before other co-workers start to trickle in. Use that hour to answer emails that need attended to and check your messages. Then when you’re ready to start your work, you won’t have the task of getting to these things later in the day.
  
  
• Set one or two times a day to check your e-mail and phone messages. Don’t constantly check your email or answer each message as it comes in. This will distract you from achieving your daily work goals.
  
  
• Go through your inbox and take care of everything you possibly can as you come to it. Try not to leave anything aside for later, which usually just creates piles of things that you might be tempted to procrastinate.
  
  
• Be friendly, but don’t start conversations that are liable to snowball into long chitchats. Stay focused and get on with your work. Learn how to end conversations, by saying things like, “OK, nice talking to you. I better get back to what I was doing or I won’t finish what I’m working on before lunch,” or something similar.

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