How Can I Eliminate Habit of Distraction at Work?

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I work in a medium sized organization and my job is a desk job. I usually make a list of things I have to do during the day, but I hardly achieve anything. I put off things until late evening and sometimes tomorrow. I procrastinate a lot at all levels and waste all my time in low-priority tasks. I know that I need to plan better and be better organised.

How can I reverse this habit and complete all the tasks on the same day? Many times i just don't feel like finishing big tasks and just do some small tasks which are enough to show my work to the superiors. I work at an entry-level position.

Kindly help me change!

king235

Posted 2014-10-08T08:01:09.390

Reputation: 9

There are dozens of questions on this site about distractions and procrastination. Maybe that is immediately your answer: how about just doing the work that is necessary?

– Jan Doggen – 2014-10-08T13:39:31.233

Sounds a lot like one part of your problem can be summed up as "procrastination". For a good take on this topic, I can recommend the book The Now Habit by Neil Fiore. It explains how can work on overcoming those problems without constantly blaming yourself for delaying stuff or "not being good enough", etc.

– glaed – 2014-10-08T19:19:06.790

Answers

Things that helped me are:

Every time you get off track, note it down, how long for and what you think triggered it. Use this information to plan against future procrastination and to see if you are making progress at beating the problem.
Break down large and challenging tasks into smaller parts and use this to track your progress
Sandwich tasks you hate between ones you enjoy
Set yourself deadlines
If your emails are not urgent, only check them 2 or 3 times a day, at set points.
Reward yourself for good behaviour, punish yourself for bad - don't be too hard on yourself though as this can be demotivating.
The tips here http://alexvermeer.com/getmotivated/

The last one is particularly useful as it gives you four potential sources of procrastination (impulsiveness, work seems unimportant, low expectations of the outcome, no close deadline) and a host of options to tackle them.

Alpar

Posted 2014-10-08T08:01:09.390

Reputation: 453

Anything you can do to better structure your day, will lower your distractability.

If this is a chronic problem, you may want to consider getting screened for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). For me, the strategies and treatment for this condition makes big difference in lowering my own distractability.

silverglade

Posted 2014-10-08T08:01:09.390

Reputation: 341

When dealing with procrastination, which is something I suffered from all the way through school and finally started to help with in college, it was never a matter of being distracted causing me not to do the work, rather I found distractions to help me put the work off. I was in accelerated classes growing up and we had some counselor talks about procrastination being a side effect of perfectionism, and that putting stuff off can be one of two other less obvious things.

You could be putting off the big work because you're a perfectionist and throwing it together in less time excuses some pressure to make it perfect because you did it in so little time.
You might be stuck over-analyzing things. This is something I find myself doing still in a programming position as there are a lot of things that go into a final project. What one of my professors my senior year told me, as we shared our anxiety problems, is to never let best get in the way of good. As a previous answer states breaking your problems down is a good thing to do, but once you break it down put something on paper or in text, sometimes making early progress is the hardest part of a big project.

And as previously noted be sure to be positive, you don't get better by telling yourself you're awful, make steps to identify why you have the problems you do and then start working on small manageable improvements.

Through addressing those things and becoming more comfortable with who I am and where I'm at I have managed to drastically lower my ability to be distracted and I hope a different perspective might help in this case.

bmac

Posted 2014-10-08T08:01:09.390

Reputation: 1