Why You Can't Get Any Work Done

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To reduce environmental distractions, managers and consultants recommend blocking cubicle entrances with stop signs or ribbons, and checking e-mail at scheduled times only. "The major complaint for people in cubicles versus offices is no door," says David Javitch, an employee management columnist for Entrepreneur.com and president of Massachusetts consulting firm Javitch Associates. "That stop sign is comical, yet it's very powerful."

Javitch, who retains his focus by answering e-mail only every hour or two, also recommends scheduling employee breaks around individual biorhythms and placing a phone in the lunch room to compartmentalize personal business. For people with ADD/ADHD, Javitch says a noise-emitting egg timer that provides a minimal distraction may improve concentration by making the brain work harder.

Coping with Big Changes

Changes in the workplace environment, however, can also be the source of a companywide distraction, as in the case of merging organizations. Lynskey, a marketing director at Wellfleet Communications when the company acquired SynOptics Communications in 1994, says the merger was so distracting that the new company, Bay Networks, fell behind its top competitor, Cisco Systems (CSCO), and never recovered. The company has since been acquired by Nortel Networks (NT).

For more moderate distractions, experts offer a variety of solutions that vary in accordance with the theories about what causes them. Lynskey blames distractions on overstaffing and employees having too much time on their hands and confronts the problem by handing them more work, while Martin suggests breaking down employees' assignments into smaller tasks when focusing is a challenge.

Dick Grote, founder of management consulting firm Grote Consulting in Dallas, argues that overworking employees and giving managers too many employees to supervise distracts them from their core mission of doing quality work. That dynamic is bad for business.

"If I'm getting so many e-mails that I'm just dashing off curt replies or ignoring some of them, it makes our company look bad," says Grote. "It causes me to make foolish errors."

According to Madbury (N.H.)-based NFI Research, two-thirds of 228 senior executives and managers who responded to a recent survey say e-mail is the most prominent workplace disruption, followed by crisis of the day (42%), personal interruptions (31%), and changing priorities (30%).

Don't Ask Me—Look It Up

When regular disruptions are caused by lack of information, Jill Bemis, accounting director for the Minnesota Agriculture Dept., improves mass communication. To reduce disruptive employee questions she creates how-to manuals and organizes conferences to go over department procedures. "That helps decrease distractions because the people who create the distractions know what they need to do," says Bemis, who is also interrupted by two dozen walk-in customers a day.

At a prior position as financial officer for Metropolitan State University, Bemis created a Web site for students to find answers to frequently asked questions that were taking up her time.

Gregory Harris, president of Quantum Market Research, a firm that does employee engagement surveys for 4,200 companies annually, says managers can keep their employees focused by providing them with opportunities for career growth, rewarding their accomplishments, and getting rid of the bad apples.

Define Your Breaking Point

"Motivations are a function of engagement, which is critical because we know that engagement is the primary determinant of productivity," says Harris. Experts say disruptive employees can generally be rehabilitated successfully, but that termination is necessary in rare cases.

Grote recommends using "managerial bifocals" to distinguish disruptions that affect productivity and require intervention from minor disturbances like when several employees waited by the time clock at the end of their shift at General ElectricGE, where he was once a first-line foreman. Martin invokes a similar test. "When the amount of work and effort exceeds the value of what the employee contributes, that's the breaking point," he says.

So take time off from your job and click here to find out what are the biggest distractions in the workplace.

Keller is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com in New York.