Do not disturb: Every 11 minute you are distracted at work and it takes 25 minutes to get back

Did you know that at the workplace, every 11th minute you are disrupted by either a ping on your chat window, a beep on your smartphone or a message alert? Sapience Analytics, a Pune-based technology firm conducted a survey across 100 IT companies in India, the US and the UK in November 2014, based on a study by the University of California, Irvine, that foundit takes a good 25 minutes before you return to your work station. According to the survey, the most-oft seen irritants or concentration breakers are chat pop-ups, social media updates and personal calls.

Here are the key takeaways from the survey:

1. If they did not access social media and e-commerce websites, 26.1 percent said it would give them more time to focus on the work at hand. Other interruptions mentioned include blocking chat/e-mail pop ups (11.4 percent) and not taking phone/mobile calls (10.2 percent). Around 4.5 percent people said putting up Do Not Disturb messages would help as well.

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2. Guess what tops as the most mindful technique at the workplace? Meditation. It is considered the most creative tool, at least 32.5 percent people who participated in the survey think so. Coming a distant close to it is to work undisturbed in fixed spurts. Around 22.1 percent voted for it. Music is not bad too. At least 21.4 percent employees gave the thumbs up to music; while 20.8 percent said what would go a long way would be communication that avoids misunderstanding at the workplace.

3. Are you the kind who has a compulsive needto check your mail? Well, you are not alone. The survey revealsthat 28 percent of employees check their mail regularly in one and two hour’s intervals. Email is clearly the most oft-used form of communication at the workplace and what’s worrisome is employees keep checking their mail more often than get down to the work on hand.

4. The most common email response is to respond to mails as soon as you receive one. Around 48 percent employees said this was their reaction, while 13.5 percent said they replied at fixed time intervals.

5. The other baneat the workplace, according to employees, is official meetings. Around 30 percent wished that the average duration of a meeting was less than an hour while an overwhelming 43.3 percent felt that duration between one hour to two was a reasonable one.

6. The ‘fag time’ break was listed as another one of the time squeezers. Sapience said that if the CXO wouldfactor in thatanaverage of 75 minutes per day was lost dueto breaks taken for smoking, then it would be advisable for him to hand out nicotine gums to the employee who indulged in smoking and then says, ‘I’ll quit smoking tomorrow’.