The notifications bing, ring and flash. All techniques to draw your attention away from your actual ‘work’.

This isn’t a one-way thing either. We are all guilty of these.

An answer to help improve the environment: Don’t have these systems notify you. Turn them off, and only turn them on when it suits you. Is your second screen used for email and IM? Use it for something else.

Seclude yourself if possible. Close a door, find a quiet space, put some headphones on. It’ll reduce office distractions even more. Plus, you’ll ‘look’ busier and people may be less likely to come over and distract you. I’ve used this technique in the past with great effect.

You see that sign, you don’t disturb that person. Feel the wrath if you do, like a spectator stopping a marathon runner!

Meetings are harder to avoid, and probably the subject for another time. The only advatage to these are that they are scheduled so you can plan your productive time around them.

A web designer and developer from the UK. I occasionally blog, frequently tweet and often procrastinate.

The last part couldn’t be more true. With RSS feeds, Twitter and other social media, lots of time can be spent keeping up-to-date and researching – but it really boils down to procrastinating (postpone doing what one should be doing).

With the immediacy of these social media, links can come in at any time, easily distracting you away from the current task in hand. Staying ‘in the zone’ can be hard with tweets popping up and other distractions such as IM, text messages and phone calls; chances are you are reading this when something more important needs to be done.

The Solution

Taking a dedicated hour out of your day to deal with these can help alleviate this. You’d be surprised how non-urgent reading your tweets are when you don’t do it for a few hours.

So turn off your Twitter client, IM and sign out of anything which could ‘pop-up’ during your day and give it a go, perhaps taking time out in the morning and afternoon to check-up and see what’s gone on in the real world and see if your productivity increases.