Why are small distractions impacting my day so much?

Question

During the pandemic, at least the premier institutes of my country are operating in work from home mode. Since this lessens the physical activity of going around labs and classrooms daily I tried to setup a fixed timetable and working environment for myself to do learning and research and was successful in doing so.

But over time, I observed the following phenomenon

Utilizing the day (fruitfully) to full extent if and only if there is no distraction. Distractions include very small tasks including meeting colleagues outside home and spending few minutes with them. Phone conversations with supervisor etc.

I am surprised to learn that my whole day becomes under-utilized if distraction happens during early parts of my day. And I am not in a position to know the exact reason behind it. Ideally, I need to break only a few minutes from my timetable and can utilize the remaining time. To my surprise, it is not happening. Either I am spending my time randomly or I am unable to properly concentrate on my work. This phenomenon generally did not happen or happened only to a very minute extent during non-pandemic days.

Is this phenomenon normal or do I need to completely prevent/avoid distractions?

Answer 1

Distractions are a tax on productivity, because you lose much more time than the duration of the distraction. It takes a lot of time and energy to switch between tasks and to regain focus. Apparently, you need on average 25 minutes to regain deep focus after becoming distracted. If you work four hours in the mornings and are distracted four times for five minutes each, half of your working time is lost before lunch break ((5 minutes + 25 minutes) * 4 = 2 hours). This also applies to self-interruptions, therefore multitasking makes you less efficient.

Answer 2

The issue you're experiencing is the problem of context switching. Multitasking can result in a 40% productivity cost, make tasks take 50% longer, and increase errors. After an interruption it can take ~25 minutes to regain focus. (It's hard to find good citations for these numbers, unfortunately.)

The solution to your problem is to guard your time.

1. Determine what priority you should assign to what you need to do. Consider using the Ivy Lee method.
2. Turn off buzzers, ringers, alert sounds, and dialog messages. These interrupt periods of focus. Leaving alerts on implicitly places others' prioritization of your time above your own. If you don't manage your devices they will manage you.
3. Consider using something like the Pomodoro technique or similar strategies to interleave focused time with breaks and outside communication. While scheduling a whole day might be hard, committing to doing something without interruption for 30 minutes is something you must be able to do to get anything done.
4. Try to understand where your tasks fall in the time management quadrants and value/prioritize them accordingly:

Answer 3

While the pomodoro technique and the urgent/important priorisation has already been mentioned, here's my personal suggestion, which includes both of them in some form or fashion:

• If you don't already have it, use an acceptable calendar app, shared between your PC and smartphone, one that integrates well with your mail system and whatever your colleagues are using.
• Meetings will be in the calendar anyways, probably.
• Now start putting everything in there. Especially if you intend to work alone on a topic, be sure to block that out. Don't forget break times (lunch etc.) - enter them as well.
• At the beginning of each day, check your calendar for today (this will also be your first calendar entry each day - "Clean up today's calendar"). Look for all conflicts and resolve them by moving them around, maybe cancelling invitations or not so important events. Here, the urgent/important distinction becomes important, of course. Your calendar for today should now be completely filled. Not only with work - there will and should be breaks in there as well, but they should be there explicitly.
• Configure your system so that mails do not pop up notifications, but your calendar does.
• Now comes the hard part: when your calendar tells you to switch to another topic, do it religiously. If you have not finished your current work, immediately find a new time slot (tomorrow or maybe today if there is another event which is not so highly prioritized) and plan it in there.
• When your 8 hours per day are up, or however much it is, stop working. Don't fall into the trap of doing everything that fell on the wayside during the day at the end.

Over time, this trains you to be methodical and realistic. If you notice that your time slots regularly are too short, then you might have to fine tune the size of those slots (for me, that's usually 30-60 minutes; 120 minutes very seldomly), or reduce the content you put in there. You want this to be a game: being done with what you intended to do in a slot should give you a little spike of joy.

You can and probably should, at least at the beginning, have buffer time slots; i.e. plan in an hour a day (or maybe one in the late morning, one in late afternoon) as a pure buffer. As you get used to it, this might not be so necessary anymore. If you run out of stuff to do in a buffer, do whatever - either take a walk, or pick anything else you wanted to do later, and pull it forward.

Reading your mail is an activity like any other - put in a time slot for it, and if possible avoid checking your mail all the time or at least ignore mails coming in during the day as best as you can (you might still look there to get updates on the things you are workin on right now).