Allowing yourself to be distracted

"Procrastination is the enemy of productivity"

Being productive with any task depends on our ability to focus and how easily we allow ourselves to be distracted.

There is one typical example of distraction that I regularly encounter during decluttering sessions: my client comes across a photo album and immediately they sit down and start looking at photos. I get it, they have not seen those in a while and it’s tempting to open the album, but in the meantime they completely forget about the task at hand.

Distracted. It’s a good thing I’m around to remind them of the work. Or course, you can replace “photo album” with any other sentimental item.

Besides being distracted during an activity, I would like to mention social media as another major contributor to distraction and – dare I say it – obsessive behaviour that keeps us from being as productive as we could be.

Being reminded of a world of distraction at all times by our smart phone’s beeps and pings clearly affects our ability to focus on anything for an extended period of time. So, maybe find ways to disengage from your phone when you need to complete a task that requires your full attention.

Multitasking is possible for some tasks, as long as the two activities use different cognitive channels in the brain. It’s perfectly fine to load the dishwasher and listen to the radio at the same time, or speak on the phone while you are watering the plants. Both use two separate input channels: tactile and linguistic channels.

However, listening to your TV and reading a book at the same time is pretty much impossible because they use the same linguistic channel to process the input. Each is a distraction for the other. The result is garbled information because you’ll have to micro-switch between two sets of input and separate it out again in your mind.

This micro-switching is what has been touted as the reason why multitasking can work, but research has shown that the benefits of doing two things at once in this scenario are actually minimal: in most cases it is actually more productive to do one thing after the other.

Another big drain on productivity is our old friend ‘procrastination’. Occasionally there is benefit to postponing a task because you don’t quite feel up to it – maybe you feel drained by something else, or you know that you wouldn’t be able to finish it before the end of your work day and restarting tomorrow would require going through the same steps once more.

However, if you postpone over and over again because you don’t feel like doing it at all, you will get into trouble. Not opening mail because it could contain bills will not take care of them. Only washing dishes when you need a clean one will create clutter in your home (and make you feel guilty all the time).

Each time you allow yourself to be distracted, your focus will suffer, and so will your productivity.