Office Distractions That Are Productivity Killers

Employees are often overwhelmed by workplace distractions, which significantly reduce their productivity. Sometimes, the distractions are due to their own actions, but many times, they're not, according to a recent survey from CareerBuilder. Yes, the ubiquitous (and tempting) nature of tech gadgets and Web surfing are major culprits. In fact, findings show that one out of four workers admitted that they will spend at least one hour of a standard workday on personal calls, emails and texts. And one-fifth estimate that they spend one hour or more of their work time searching the Internet for non-work-related information and photos, etc. In addition to limiting such pursuits to lunchtime and other designated break times, you can follow these suggestions from CareerBuilder to make the best use of your time on the job: De-clutter your desk so you can find things quickly when you need them. Organize your brain by focusing on your daily to-do list and include estimated time requirements for individual tasks. Don't allocate large blocks of time to composing and revising emails when you can have a phone or in-person conversation much more efficiently. As an added bonus, we're including a couple of CareerBuilder's outrageous real-life examples of time-wasting employees. Nearly 2,200 hiring managers and HR professionals and more than 3,020 workers took part in the research.