3 ways to ward off workplace interruptions
The guy who begs for ‘a minute’ to vent, the boss whose sense of scale for ‘minor tweaks’ to a project is way off, the meeting mooch—all can eat up your time. Here’s how to fend them off.
“Got a minute?” one co-worker would say.
Of course, he always took a whole lot more time than a minute. From people stopping by your desk, to your boss wanting “just one more thing,” to colleagues breaking into your speech during a meeting, interrupters can steal your focus and jumble your thoughts.
Most office workers are interrupted roughly every 11 minutes, according to a University of California at Irvine study, and it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to recover from an interruption. No wonder we all feel overstressed and underwater.
There are mindfulness techniques to help you regain focus and note-taking tips to help you find where you left off before the interruption occurred, so you can get back to your work quickly and accurately. But what if you could head off the disruptions themselves?
Instead of feeling rattled and having to expend so much time and energy on recovery, you can work on reducing the frequency and repetitiveness of interruptions by practicing kind and reasonable accommodations.
Here are three ways to fend off interruptions:
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