Highway mileage

Highway mileage is always better than city mileage because it’s a more efficient way to travel.

On the highway, you get up to speed and then travel for long distances largely uninterrupted. In the city, there are more intersections, stop signs/lights, and congestion. More “stop and go.” More interruptions.

Around the office it’s hard to get highway mileage. Meetings, phone calls, real-time tools like chat and Twitter, and people dropping by for one reason or another make it hard to get up to speed. Or, if you’ve actually gotten up to speed, they bring you to an abrupt halt. And then it’s hard to get up to speed again.

Rework

In an earlier post, I looked at some tactics to shut out the distractions of technology by changing platforms to a single-task device, but that doesn’t address many of the environmental distractions in an office environment. In their book Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (founders of 37signals) devote a few pages to this topic, declaring interruption to be the enemy of productivity. It’s very inefficient, they argue, to break your work day into a series “work moments” due to constant interruptions. They strongly recommend that you get into the “alone zone” for long stretches of time in order to get more productive. They use four-hour stretches of alone zone time as an example. Imagine what you could accomplish with that built into your day…

Their book talks a lot about building a company culture that better reflects today’s work environment, but even if you are not able to set rules for your organization, they implore you to tackle this on an individual level. After all, they argue, “Your day is under siege by interruptions. It’s on you to fight back.”

Photo credit: dotsi

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