Fighting distractions, and how "Mugg & Bean Wednesdays" was born.

As owners of the shop, Paul and I have a variety of tasks that need performed. Not all of these tasks are time critical, but they are very important, and they need to be done. Every day of the week, Paul and I answer emails, phone calls, Live chat and forum queries. On a Wednesday, we leave the office in the capable hands of Phillip and Ivan, and we take the day to head out to Mugg & Bean and sit and get some work done.

It’s a day of thinking, meeting, writing blog posts (since we don’t generally get time during the week to type up a blog post, and we aim to blog 3 - 5 times a week), talking strategy and catch up on a few other tasks that we often don’t have time for, and that benefit from having uninterrupted focus. This means reading up on things like SEO (for me) and email marketing (Paul) and other stuff that a good entrepreneur should know (but don’t, unless you read a lot).

The down side to this is that we’re not readily reachable on a Wednesday (although Phillip and Ivan do have our contact details if there is an emergency), and Live Chat is switched off for the day (usually, although there are exceptions).

So why do we get out of the office? We find that being able to allocate an hour (or five!) to a single task, with no interruptions, is great for our productivity. A lot of the work we do takes time to get focused on, and time to get organised in our heads. If you are in the middle of working on something mentally demanding, a 5 minute interruption costs you not only the 5 minutes you spend working on it, but another 10 minutes getting focused back in on the task at hand. We operate in a busy office, with diverse demands. For example, of the 10 top distractions listed by Key Organization, we experience 7 or 8 on an average day.

As a company, we want our company culture to place a value on each individuals Time and Attention - to treat them as limited and valuable resources. For more information on why we hold this belief, check out the following presentation from Merlin Mann (Who writes at 43folders, and is a huge evangalist of Inbox Zero and getting things done), given at Google Tech Talks in March 2008.



37Signals also talks about how your work environment can impact your productivity and ways to work around your shortfalls. The one company they interviewed for this article, Campaign Monitor, has closed offices for each of their employees, to minimize distractions. However, having closed offices can lessen communications and connectedness between your team. To counter this, they eat lunch together daily as a team, and often plan social events outside of the office. Campaign Monitor specifically chose to move from open plan offices to seperate offices in order to gain the benefits of increased productivity.

Finally, there are two more benefits to heading out off the office - it gives the rest of our team a chance to step up their game and take on additional responsibility, and it gives us a valuable change of scenary that encourages creativity!