Three Biggest Distractions in Business

What takes your time away?  Have you ever gone on facebook for five minutes and lost an hour?

The same can happen when you open your inbox, pick up the phone or get caught up in gossip within the workplace. Time and energy are precious; they are the two things we cannot ever get back again once lost.

I recently had a telephone conversation with a business associate in Minneapolis.  She was stressed and overwhelmed by the fact that there were 3,500 unread emails in her inbox… WOW was my first reaction and then okay how do you deal with it?

Four Top Tips for Handling Emails

1. Stop using your inbox as a storage box.
2. Put chunks of time aside each day when you will focus on your inbox, no more than three times a day.
3. As you open each email, delete, respond or file out of your inbox.
4. Be ruthless and delete anything that has been lying in your inbox for months.

How to Handle Phone Distractions

1. Work as a team.
2. If you have a deadline to meet, work with a colleague next to you and ask him/her to take calls for you for one hour, then you can help them in return.
3. Return all your outgoing calls in one hour chunks. Build it into your diary.

How to Handle People Who Waste Time

1. Be firm and clear. Arrange to speak to them over lunch or at a coffee break.
2. Always when meeting, set a start and finish time.

I encourage you to use your energy wisely because without world class levels of energy, you cannot be or reach world class in business.