Try this for one day and report your increased efficiency. Simple to do.

John, I work from my home office 80% of the time  and all I do is email, email, etc and in the background my Bose System has 91.5 classical radio station on and no distraction just soft stimulating classical music:)Endre

Morning John.

I can tell you that would not work for me.  My mind would wonder all over the place, it would just make things worse

Hi John- it's been shown that while we think we can multi-task, in reality, we can't. Listening to music can be a distraction especially if you're prone to humming along with the music, tapping your toes, or dancing in your chair. 

I always turn off the audio when trying to work or concentrate - otherwise it's just too distracting.  And YouTube... don't even get me started on that time suck.

Hi John I have been doing this for years. Drives me nuts to have sounds going off when I'm focused on whatever.  It is such a huge time drain - HUGE.

Totally agree distraction is a problem for the most part. The challenge is a good one no music, no video, no noise hmm this will be a challenge for sure. Will try it for one day and see what happens. 

John, I'm with Gwen when I'm in cubicle land.  The noise outside my cube too distracting?  Headphones, Pandora, and away I go.  And in general the sound is off on my laptop.  Bill

Efficiency is the name of the game here and everything else follows after that. That’s what I think anyway. Keep doing what you do! :)

cubicle land is one of those places where once you get out you kind of don’t want to go back more than every once in a while


Liz and Bill Spear

This is one of those times where memes keep us together. It’s nine for me and do some research

Great advice. I keep my audio off most of the time. Same goes for my phone but, that doesn't help much in that area. It doesn't help to close all tables with the exception of the one or two I'm working in. Have a great day!

When I am working i love to have music on softly behnd me. It drowns out the white noise. 

Hello John - "But I can effectively manage distractions with focused multi-tasking efforts".  Right?  I read/heard that somewhere.  Some time. But it was on the news crawl while channel surfing or listening to NPR.  Or was it that podcast? Ahh, never mind.

Darn. I was hoping you'd have something that would work for me. Not this, though, because I already seldom look at a video or listen to music. When I'm working I don't want any sound more distracting than the furnace or the refrigerator coming on. I know a lot of people work to music, but I can't do it. If I like it, I either want to sing along or get up and dance. If I don't like it, it just annoys me.

I guess I do know the cure - that would be to avoid checking my email. I do tend to stop and read things.

Good morning John Henry ,

I'm use to staying focused and don't like distractions when I'm working on something important and trying to meet deadlines. My available time now with my husbands illness has affected the amount of time I have available so its even more important to use my time wisely. When I'm working..no distractions...its a time killer for me and I can't afford that time away from what is important right now in my life.

I live and work in a world of distractions ... sometimes I get caught up in it or I just blank it all out and hone in on my projects. Emails and social media is a real problem for me.

I hardly ever listen to music or watch something on Youtube. Unless I'm done working for the day that is.

Oh wow, where do I even begin John Henry?!  I believe we've all become "Pavlov's dogs" with all of the alert sounds; chimes, beeps or whatever that make our head snap and wonder "what's that?", "who wants/needs me now?", etc. I am completely guilty of that but have learned, as you illustrated in your post, that if you really need to bang something out and can't be distracted, then yes, turn off the sound. For me, that includes music, as that can also be as distracting as it is calming. It's funny, but I almost can't remember the days where these electronic devices and their associated sounds weren't an integral part of our lives.

That is definitely a way to work and pay full attention to what to accomplish.  Sometimes I get distracted when I see another email to respond to and think, "it will only take a sec."  But in reality that one email will distract me from completing a single task.  Ugh!