How spending $0.95 increased my productivity by 10x

To begin with I should say that I believe all of God’s creatures have value and place on the Earth.

The notable exception to this would be flies (and possibly mosquitoes). I rather strongly dislike flies. Whether it be at a picnic in the park, or at a family barbecue, or (like today) they are buzzing around my head while I am trying to work, they really irritate me.

Today as I was working on my laptop there appeared out of no where three obnoxious flies buzzing around the room, occasionally landing on the table and on my arms. Someone must have left a door open and a gang of three flies had trespassed into my house.

When I turned on some music on my laptop the flies were attracted to this and began landing on my laptop. There’s nothing more distracting than having a fly walk on your computer screen as your are typing.

Frustrated by this I went in search of the fly swatter. I looked in all the usual places: the hall closet, the coat closet, and under the kitchen sink. But it was no where to be found.

So I decided to try to ignore the buggers. I had a lot to get done and didn’t want to spend the 20 minutes to go buy a fly swatter at the nearby Walgreen’s. That turned out to be a mistake.

For nearly 2 hours I was distracted by the little buggers. They continued to harass me while I spent my working time trying to find new substitutes for a fly swatter. None of the things I tried worked mostly due to my lack of hand-and-eye coordination.

And guess how much work I got done. Very little.

I finally got fed up and took the 20 minutes to go buy a fly swatter. That was the best decision I made all day.

The new fly swatter and I came home with a vengeance.

Walking in the door I announced to the flies that I was back and I had a new friend. With a smile I asked the flies if they had any last requests. They declined to respond and then the slaughter commenced, complete with karate like “hi yah” sounds.

The cost of purchasing the new fly swatter was a measly $0.95 plus 20 minutes of my time which isn’t much considering I wasted two hours trying to kill or trap the flies. (I should mention I was successful in trapping one of the three in the upstairs bathroom which left two to tag-team against me.)

Now if I had been smart I would have realized that this problem wasn’t going to disappear or go away and that trying to ignore it wouldn’t do anything except significantly decrease my productivity. I should have stopped my work and addressed the distraction immediately.

Everyday we encounter numerous distractions that seriously hurt our productivity.

In my field of software development distractions cost companies huge sums of money. And the worst part is that companies usually have no way to account for the cost!

The range of distractions we face is broad:

• Sleep deprivation seems to be a big one for a lot of people. Speaking from personal experience, 6 hours of work from me when I am well rested is worth much than 8 or 10 hours of work when I am tired. If you are tired consider taking a short nap. It’s time well invested.
• Co-worker chatter is another distraction. What a difference headphones with noise cancellation make! It’s also helpful to ask people to take cell phone calls outside the office.
• Having a chair that hurts your back or that just isn’t comfortable kills your focus and can adversely effect how well you sleep at night. The fight to get better office chairs is long and hard but it’s worth the battle.
• Sometimes there will be a personal issue that is stealing your focus. Maybe it’s an important call you have been putting off or an apology that needs to be made. Whatever it is, take care of it so you can be productive.

Everyday we are bombarded with distractions and most of them can be prevented. So don’t try to just ignore them. Instead take action and take care of business, even if it means going to the store to buy a new fly swatter.

2 Comments