How To Stay Productive When Your Work is the Distraction

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about personal productivity lately, having appeared on a number of podcasts in the lead up to the release of my next book, Time Rich, in October.

Distractions and interruptions knock us out of the flow state, or ‘the zone’, and each time we’re interrupted we suffer a cognitive switching penalty which can be up to 23 minutes long.

But what if your work is intertwined with so-called distractions, such as social media marketing?

This is a question I was posed at a recent online workshop I hosted for Startup Grind.

My answer was this.

Output is the result of a value chain of inputs.

At an organisational level, a simple value chain might look like the below, inspired by famed management thinker, Michael Porter.

The Value Chain of Your Work

Applying this to social media marketing, we might end up with an end-to-end sequence like this:

• Define Objectives
• Research In-Demand Content