Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

Battling Distractions and Procrastination Cycles

It’s definitely easy to get distracted while at work, and it’s also easy to find yourself procrastinating more and more on the same projects.

I get fairly distracted with the random emails flooding into my inbox, the occasional ping on Skype, the stomach rumbling, the craving for some music.

Sometimes co-workers can be distracting too. They ask to bounce ideas off of you and then there’s a 15 minute intellectual exchange, which occasionally takes a tangent extending the exchange to 25 minutes. Then I bring up the idea of playing basketball or grabbing some food. Two hours later, we’re back at work!

Then I try to tackle the project I was hoping to complete a month ago, and decide to spend more time doing several smaller projects just because there is an instant gratification factor, unlike with working on bigger projects.

I guess battling distractions and procrastination is something that I still need to work on. We had ‘working hours’ where there would be quiet time and full concentration, but that got trashed fairly quickly.

It’s not about how many hours we work, or when we work. We are results-driven, like most startups and works should be. It’s not about how hard you work. Instead, it’s more important how smart you work and how well you can produce results.

We have an interesting set-up with our custom dress shirt venture. We work when we want, however we want, and just make sure we are all accountable for ourselves. One person makes sure the supply chain is working right so that all our dress shirts that are supposed to be slim fit dress shirts are not full-cut dress shirts. Another person works on marketing to make sure we are getting quality press mentions. The next guy works to make sure that our technology is working properly. Then another guy spends time making sure the design-it-yourself custom men’s dress shirt experience is really all that it’s cracked up to be.