Small business owners, booking agencies, and entrepreneurs are continually bombarded with phone calls, texts, knocks on the door, unexpected visitors and more. How do we ever get anything done?

Avoiding Disruptions During Work Hours

Especially if you are involved in the middle of an activity, the best productivity tip is to practice focus and finish the task at hand when disrupted. Concentration is under-rated and is a critical factor in managing events, tasks, and people. Naturally, event management and event planning is filled with planned and unplanned disruptions, and handling them gracefully is the order of the day. Productivity will increase if you can develop long-term practices to overcome disruptions and distractions.

Disrupting Phone Calls

Phone calls can always disrupt your activity while getting things done. Call marketers and phone spam is on the rise, and comes in all forms. To decrease the number of calls the National Do Not Call Registry https://donotcall.gov is still active and may help out. Focused phone hours helps out as well. I do keep established phone hours, and don’t receive calls outside of those hours.

Since I’ve been an entrepreneur for many years, I have answered countless, countless marketing calls. Automated ones, local organizations, international representatives and many more come in regularly . . and I don’t know if they will ever go 100% away. But there are a few suggestions I have. Automated calls can usually accept a “2” command while on the call, which will remove your number from their call list. When live persons call, one can hear the call center background noise as a tip off. I often immediately ask what company they are calling from, before they are able to make their pitches, and politely state I’m not interested.

Knocks at the Door

When I see non-employees coming to the door, I always try to be prepared to get through the disruption quickly. Sometimes I pretend I’m on the phone! I most often let the visitors know that I’m busy for the day – and won’t be available.

As business owners, our time is very, very precious. Disruptions do interrupt our activities, our focused efforts, and our overall business operations, and take away our productivity. It’s a regular part of “business life”, but we’ll be more productive to reduce our attention given to them.

photo credit: The phone call (retouched) via photopin (license)