Distractions

The other day a colleague came over and asked me if I had a response to the email they’d sent to me and I replied, “oh sorry I haven’t seen any emails for a little while”, the response to that was “but I sent it ages ago”

Me: “oh really when, how long ago, how urgent was it?”

Colleague: “about 15 minutes ago, it was more of an fyi really”

Me: “oh right ok”

I have to say, it did leave me wondering if this era of NOW! is perhaps a little too distracting.

As a project manager, part of the role is to create SoW documents and to do that, it often takes some time to ensure you have all the right information available to you and in some cases obtain the correct information. In this instance, that’s exactly what I was doing – writing an SoW with care and accuracy.

I thought I was doing the right thing by closing out of my emails to allow me some dedicated time and space to create this document for a new project. It turned out that this wasn’t quite agreeable to other colleagues.

I then wondered what other distractions there are in this fast-paced, digital, technology driven world that we are living in which forces humans to become ‘NOW’ types both personally and professionally.

Take a look at this Hierarchy of Digital Distractions and let me know which of these you spend your time on – go on, I really need to kill this curiosity.

The bottom of the hierarchy, in this case, refers to the SoW that I was focusing on, i.e. ACTUAL WORK, needless to say, you’ll see that email is the biggest distraction, it goes pretty much all the way to the top of the hierarchy.

Image source: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/