Chapter 4 – Time Management
4.4 Distractions
Time is one of your most valuable resources in learning, yet distractions can quietly steal large portions of it. Research shows that it can take more than 20 minutes to return to full concentration after being interrupted. Multiple disruptions in a single study session can leave you feeling like you worked hard but accomplished little. Managing distractions is not just about eliminating them—it’s about managing your time intentionally. This means selecting study environments that minimize interruptions, setting clear boundaries with others, silencing unnecessary notifications, and creating routines that protect your focus. It also involves self-monitoring—tracking how often you lose concentration and identifying patterns that waste time.
External Distractions
External distractions originate outside of you. They might be your roommates, family or friends. Even if they are supportive of your studying, it may be challenging to concentrate when they are around. Pick a setting that limits distractions and assess the noise level and its impact on your productivity. Saying “no” is an important skill that may need to be utilized in order for you to have your study time without interruption.
Keep in mind that it may take 20 minutes to reach a high level of concentration. When we are interrupted, it takes on average another 23 minutes to get back to the level of concentration that we were at prior to the disruption.4 If a student is studying for an hour and is interrupted twice, the consequence to study efficiency is devastating.
One way to try to monitor how many interruptions you incur and how well you maintain your level of concentration is to keep track of it. Take a blank piece of paper when you are studying and mark down each time you were interrupted. Over time, with practice, you should be able to decrease the number of interruptions you incur. This will allow you to be most efficient when studying.
Internal Distractions
An internal distraction is a thought process that interrupts you from what you’re doing. Managing these thought patterns while you study can be important to limit distractions. You can try writing down distracting thoughts or outside tasks that you will need to accomplish so you don’t forget them later.3 Internal distractions also include a computer or cell phone – something that is controlled by you. Many students intend to study but easily get distracted by surfing the Internet, checking social media, watching YouTube videos, or responding to a text message. If you don’t absolutely need your computer or cell phone for studying, turn them off. If you do study with your phone or computer, it is best to have all potential alerts turned off. Notifications of text messages, emails, or social media updates all can serve as a major distraction to your studying.
Handling Distractions
Every distraction or interruption that derails your productivity can be sorted into one of four categories, depending on whether the distraction is annoying or fun, and whether or not you have control over it. Here are the four types of distractions that derail your productivity, and how to deal with them!1
Distractions We Can’t Control
It is helpful to realize there are distractions we cannot control—ones that are both annoying (office visitors, loud colleagues, required meetings), and those that are fun (your coworker asking if you’d like to join the team for lunch).
The key to dealing with these derailments is not to prevent them from happening—their very nature prevents you from doing so. Instead, it is up to you to change how you respond—quickly getting back on track after annoying interruptions, and enjoying any fun interruptions that happen to arise.
Distractions We Can Control
Thankfully, the list of distractions we can control is much longer—it includes emails, phone calls, audible and vibrating alerts, text messages, social media, news websites, and the internet.
The solution to dealing with these distractions is simple: eliminate the interruptions ahead of time. If you frequently stumble into productivity potholes while on the internet, disconnect while doing your most important work. If checking email is eating away at your productivity, or email alerts are preventing you from focusing on your work, disable those beeps and bloops, and turn off the new message notifications that pop into the corner of your screen as you are working. Schedule a few windows throughout the day to intentionally check your email, instead of checking it habitually.
Most distractions are easier to deal with in advance than they are to resist as they come up. The reason we often fall victim to fun (or stimulating) distractions is simple: in the moment, we see distractions as more alluring (albeit less productive) compared to what we ought to be doing. Clearing these distractions ahead of time gives us the focus needed to stay on track.
The next time you get distracted or interrupted in your work, ask this question: Was the interruption within or outside your control? Next time, can you deal with the interruption ahead of time in order to reclaim some productivity? Can you change how you deal with the distraction the next time around, or get back on track quicker?
Not all workplace distractions and interruptions are within your control—but many are. It’s worth dealing with them accordingly.
Multitasking
Brain science tells us that multitasking is a myth.5 Trying to do multiple things at the same time may seem like it may allow you to accomplish more but when studying it often leads to accomplishing less. A study from Carnegie Mellon University found that driving while listening to a cell phone reduces the amount of brain activity associated with driving by 37 percent.7. Why would anyone choose to use less brain activity when they study?
Watch this selective attention test video and see if you come up with the correct answer.
Video: Selective Attention Test, Daniel Simmons
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/acad/?p=130
Citations
- Bailey, Chris. 2016. 4 Types of Distractions that Derail Your Productivity. A Life of Productivity. https://alifeofproductivity.com/4-types-of-distractions-that-derail-your-productivity/. CC BY 3.0.
- Distractions. The Learning Center. University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. (2020, July 24). Retrieved from https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/take-charge-of-distractions/
- Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Kiocke, “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress,” 2008, https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf.
- Jim Taylor, “Technology: Myth of Multitasking,” 2011, Psychology Today, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-prime/201103/technology-myth-multitasking.
