The 5 distractions that steal 2 hours of your day

You lose more than 2 hours a day to distractions*, this adds up to around 60 work days a year. In other words, 20-25% of your time at work is sucked up by distractions.

Data collected by Building 20 (and triangulated with the findings of several studies), shows that we're distracted between 30-60 times a day. On average, each distraction takes you away from your work for 3-4 minutes (if you're distracted during deep work, it takes 23 minutes to get back into the flow).

Figure 1 shows how much time the top 5 distractions steal out of your day. I've cut the data into three employment categories (start-ups, government, and service firms & industry) to account for the general differences between each type of workplace.

Figure 1: Minutes lost per distraction by organisation classification.

Source: Building 20 data.

There are 3 important lessons hidden within Figure 1.

1. 80% of distractions are trivial. While some distractions are vital to accelerate the creative process, most can be eliminated without loss. For example, one top-tier consulting firm reported that only 1% of consultants' distractions were client-related (such as, uplanned client phone calls).

2. Digital tools can hinder not help. We use email, Slack, Trello, Instant Messenger, LinkedIn, Skype, among many others to communicate with colleagues, clients, and beyond. These technologies promise new and exciting ways of collaboration, but often they fragment our attention and stifle productivity; this is especially true when the purpose and value-add of the technology is not defined by the organisation. For example, employees of one start-up noted they checked every Slack notification because they didn't want to be left out of important decisions; no thought had been given to whether important decisions should be made on Slack.

3. Distractions are just symptoms, you need to identify the root causes. I've worked with a number of organisations to uncover the sources of (and solutions to) distractions. What I've learned is that frivolous distractions are the symptoms of ingrained norms, both personal and organisational. To remove distractions for good, their root causes must be identified and dealt with. Over the coming weeks, I'll write about several root causes of distractions and how to use the science of habits, willpower, and incentives to profoundly improve workplace productivity.

* 'Distractions' are any interruption that takes your attention away from your current task.