Sometimes despite our best efforts to stay productive and actually do meaningful work, we cannot seem to prevent ourselves from straying off tangent and being distracted by anything and everything especially during these end of year season with Christmas and New Years just around the corner.
Below are the five things that we tend to accidentally do at work:
1. Being busy without actually doing work
Have you ever gotten in bright and early on a Monday morning and just decided that today will be the day I’ll be productive. As you sit down at your desk and look over at the amount of work you have to do, you then decide that you’d probably need coffee first.
After your coffee you decide maybe you should clear your emails, oh and since you’re already organizing online you might as well reorganize your desktop and you definitely would also talk to Sarah from accounting about those claims that you’ve missed out the last time.
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2. Getting sucked into a black hole online
Doing research or any form of analysis that requires us to work online, has always been a little bit tricky. Not only do we have to comb through thousands of sites for information and cite them properly but we would also have to resists the allure of pop up ads and side bar ads that are strategically placed to intentionally catch our eye.
Not to mention the hyperlinks within the research material. And we could stop, refrain ourselves from being sucked into a black hole of never ending information but
3. Forget that we actually are at work
Another thing that we sometimes accidentally do while at work is that we forget we’re there to actually work. We get so caught up with certain things during our break time that we actually sometimes we’re still at work.
You’d be there talking to your colleague about a report or about a prospective client, intently discussing work matters when suddenly you’ve got the urge to ask him about something else, and another thing and another, after a while you’ve gone so far off tangent that you’ve absolutely no idea how you got there.
4. Munch a little too much.
The pantry the place where we the gravitational pull gets stronger with each day our deadlines get closer. And as much as your try to stop yourself from snacking on those Chinese New Year cookies every 5 minutes, let’s be honest we’ve already exhausted all our will power to continue working on particularly difficult tasks, there simply isn’t enough will power left over for us to resists the cookie jar.
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5. Have discussions that turn into meetings which turns into conferences
You’re set, already working on something when suddenly your colleague needs to run some ideas by you for the big presentation. You put your work on hold and bounce of ideas with your colleague when suddenly the both of you realise that you need a second opinion because you’d want to avoid tunnel vision.
You get another person on board and you slowly move into the nearest meeting room because your discussions are getting a little too animated and loud for the others to concentrate. Ten minutes in and this discussion turns into a meeting with flip charts and an additional two other people. At the end of the meeting you’ve realized that it has turned into a conference with calls to other people in different branches all with the client on hold at the other line.
In these moments, you look around and think to yourself
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Note: this piece isn't a self help, nor does it provide you steps to help you with anything. It's just a shout out to everyone who has ever felt that working can get a little too much.
Hang in there and know that there are others who's going through the same things.
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