Top 5 Productivity Killers at the Office

3 months ago we all decided it would be best to work in an actual office, instead of from home. In order to increase the level of professionalism and productivity in our day to day work, one thing we decided we wanted to do right from the start was try to track our productivity in the new work environment.

We gathered our entire office into the conference room, busted out the whiteboard and started listing all the software and tools that distract us and keep us from doing our work. Here is what we came up with and why we had to give them the boot . .

IM: (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Chat, Twitter)

PRODUCTIVITY KILLERS! Ok so hey we're not totally out of our minds, we do use these tools at times to keep in touch with our staff, partners, and contractors. The reason that we say it's a real productivity killer is because of all the non-work related chatter inherit with these programs. You get links to the latest you-tube videos, rants, bored "whatups" from people with nothing better to than waste your precious time. It takes a good 15-20 minutes to get back in the zone and being productive, you can just imagine the effect this has on people over an 8 hr work period. Twitter is a whole other beast. If in a few months my co-workers and associates asking me to get on twitter, I will permanently unplug my Ethernet connection.

Internet Browsing

Yes, it's great having information at your fingertips and the browser has been the single best tool at getting us information hosted on thousands if not millions of servers across the inter-planetary-galactic-universe-watchamacallit. The problem is it's not only information. Any worry, thought, inkling for a bit of mid-work entertainment and boom, off to browser land and onto your favorite World Wide Web Address. Mix the Browser with IM and you got a lethal concoction of mindless stupor that can lead to hours of ROFL, LOL, checkdisout!.

Search (Google,Yahoo,MSN)

Once again, great tool with tremendous benefits. But it's never just used for what it's ideally meant to be used for. The Search Engine is the new Calculator of our time. We just don't have to think anymore. Any problem, question, thought we have can now be Google'd. Yes just Google away and hope that someone else has done all the hard-thinking work for us and posted it in some forum, some blog, some article. Most of the time unless it's technical, it rarely helps and we find out hey we actually need to put some thought into our work. Throw in a mix of ads, irrelevant search results and my search for the answer to my latest problem lands me on a blog about why my dog feels the need to hump my neighbors leg.

Faxing

Oh how I detest this. If this list was up to me and not the whole staff at our office, every item on this list would have to do with the fax machine! Why is it in the time of IM, 2gig Emails, VOIP, Wireless web on my iPhone, that I still have to run to the stupid FAX machine? The thing takes 1 page at a time with it's AOL Dialup like buzzing like sound. The only improvement in the decades this machine has been around is that now it comes combined in all-in-one. It's a total killer, there needs to be a better solution to send documents securely between two parties. There is money to be made here. Someone needs to get on it. If I am still using the fax machine in 5 years to send secure documents, please feel free to come and kick me on the shins!

E-Mail

Now this is a great tool, I'm not putting down its immense usefulness. I am putting down the people that don't know how to use it and the people that think I really want to know how to enlarge an appendage on my body and that I need to know about everyday of the week. Why do I have to dig through 100 emails to get to the one that is most important to me. Why? Why? Why?

And even when I get to the important ones, the senders don't have a clue how to use the subject box to title an e-mail properly, either using "Help", "Respond back", "ASAP" . Mind you, these are the same subject titles used by the good folks at AcmeAppendageEnlargement Inc.

Now all the tools and services mentioned above are great. They've done a lot to help people in business stay connected and share information at amazing speed. We've gone from a world of writing letters (that had formal etiquette) to a using various communication tools with no generally accepted guidelines for use. These are great tools, but used improperly they seriously drain productivity. We can't escape using them if we want to be part of what's going on in society. So we have to adapt and learn.

What do you do at your company(or in your professional life) to kill the productivity drain associated with these tools?