You’ve worked out, had a healthy breakfast, and downed your morning coffee. As you stroll into your office, you’re full of energy and ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work on a big project.
But life has other plans for you. As soon as you sit down at your desk, your team member asks you to take a customer’s urgent call. You start mapping out your project, but a junior team member stops by and needs advice. Thirty minutes later, you get rolling again, but the building manager stops by with an update on new security procedures. Now, it’s 11:50. You decide to eat lunch at your desk when everyone else is out, so you can actually get some work done.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Here are three ways to get things done when it feels like you’re conducting business in a busy airport terminal.
Start with a plan.
Staying focused on what’s most important to get done every day will help you keep distractions from derailing you. Start every work week with an idea of the most important thing you need to get done, advise Ron Carson and Scott Ford in their book The Sustainable Edge. Then, each day before you leave work, create a list of the six most important things to accomplish the next day, in order of priority. These priorities will, ideally, support your big-picture goal for the week. Don’t start working on number two until you’ve accomplished number one, they recommend.
You probably won’t get through every item on your list every day, but if you set out with an idea of what you really need to do, you’ll start finding ways to cross less-important, distracting tasks off your list or find ways to delegate them. If your #1 priority is, for instance, getting a proposal to a new customer–and the building manager drops by–you might decide to schedule a meeting for the next day when you have more time or to delegate the discussion to someone else on your team.
Understand what really distracts you—and plan around it.
We all have unique triggers that can distract us. It may be noise, an uncomfortable office temperature, renovations going on in the office or a host of other things. Knowing what tends to throw you off can help you plan around it. If, for instance, your landscaping team usually shows up on Thursday mornings with a noisy leaf blower and it’s hard to make phone calls or concentrate on written work, block out that time for more mundane tasks that you need to get done that week or schedule your out-of-office meetings then.
Create an interruption-free zone.
If you’re getting distracted by your workplace environment, chances are your team is, too. If your office is very cramped, consider setting aside the conference room as a quiet place where you and other team members can work on projects without distraction during certain hours of the day, kind of like the quiet car on a train. Don’t have a conference room? Consider bringing headphones to work. As the leader of your company, you don’t want to convey the message that you’re tuning people out, but using your headset once in awhile during crunch time isn’t likely to do that—and listening to music you find energizing or relaxing will help you keep plowing through the work until it’s done.
Consider rotating your seating.
In some offices, the workplace is noisy because cliques have formed and team members in those groups are very chatty. While it’s great to see office friendships blossom, if there is constant talking going on and not a lot of work being done, it may be a good idea to rotate the seating arrangements from time to time. It’s a great way for everyone to get to know other coworkers so there is more cross-pollination of ideas.
Build mental discipline.
Taking up a new interest that helps you build focus and concentration—whether it’s meditation, yoga or martial arts—can help you to find the mental space to get things done when your office is especially chaotic. They’ll also help you with handling work-related stress. We can’t always control our workplace environment, but we can control how we react to it. Being able to do that is a powerful tool when it comes to getting things done.