Forbes Mexico.
How to manage distracted
“El éxito es directamente proporcional a tu capacidad de mantenerte enfocado en lo que importa” Tony Robbins
Every day we live surrounded by endless things that require our attention: family, tasks at home, the economy, our free time activities. What happens when these issues occupy our attention in our work? We know that in our time this has been aggravated by the existence of mobile devices, which distract us with the new fashionable application, the premiere of a new movie, new memes that entertain us for hours on end.
According to recent research by Zippia, 79% of workers suffer from some type of distraction in their workplace. The same study reveals that between 2.5 and 3 hours of work a day are lost due to lack of concentration. Leaders who seek to take care of the performance of their family business must take this reality into account in order to face it with an intelligent strategy. Let’s explore together some keys to help your work team make better use of their time.
- Understanding the problem: why are we distracted? Our collaborators are not children who can get distracted just because. The lack of focus in a work team not only implies a personal issue, it can also be related to the work culture. Distraction can be associated with stress, work overload, lack of clarity in responsibilities to be fulfilled, or accumulated fatigue. Prepared leadership must know that distraction will always exist, what matters is the strategy we use to reduce it and achieve the necessary focus on our team members.
- When order arrives, distraction leaves. A TeamStage investigation on the subject shows us an impressive fact: a distracted worker tends to make twice as many errors as when he works focused. Generating awareness in your team about the cost of distraction requires an effective strategy in this regard. Therefore, it is necessary to start by establishing priorities in daily work and communicating them clearly, hand in hand with a realistic schedule of these goals. Another way to organize corporate efforts is to divide large long-term projects into several tasks that do not imply a loss of perspective in our team. Finally, structuring a balanced agenda implies being aware that scheduling unnecessary activities takes our team out of focus and, therefore, it is important to avoid overload with unnecessary meetings, leave aside saturation with emails and establish times for consultations between colleagues so as not to distract them at times when they are busy.
“Prepared leadership must know that distraction will always exist, what matters is the strategy we use to reduce it and achieve the necessary focus.”
- Managing moments of distraction. At some point we all need to give ourselves a break‘, and we do it because it gives us a break from other activities that can tire us out. There are various work methodologies that have found the value of scheduling breaks in the daily workday, that is, providing moments of distraction that help us not become alienated and return to work with new strength, for example, the Pomodoro technique, which It proposes work periods of 25 minutes, followed by breaks of 5 minutes. It also helps better concentration that our company promotes a culture of effective free time, allowing our collaborators to completely “disconnect” from work in their free time.
We know that new generations have practically been born with a cell phone in their hand. The leadership of a family business must know that avoiding distraction does not simply mean prohibiting the use of a device, it is a matter that involves negotiating and establishing agreements that help find a balance within the work context.
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How to manage distracted
Mario Rizo Rivas