13 Common Distractions at Work and How to Fight Them

Whether you work in a busy office or a busy home, there’s plenty to distract you. Besides preventing you from getting things done, distractions can negatively impact your work relationships. For example, careless errors and forgotten appointments can damage your reputation in the eyes of your clients and colleagues. Don’t let it happen to you! Let’s identify strategies to fight thirteen common work distractions.

Technology

Cell Phones

If distractions were diseases, your cell phone would be the plague-spreading host organism. Besides phone calls, you might receive text messages and notifications. You might be tempted to play games or check social media. However, let’s face facts. Unless your cell phone is essential to your job, nothing is stopping you from putting it on silent and tucking it out of sight during work hours. In an emergency, your loved ones can reach you on the landline. If you need your cell phone to work, limit yourself to the functions and apps that directly relate to your job.

Social Media and Games

Some people find it easier to resist temptation if they permit themselves to check social media or play games during their lunch break. You will have a guilt-free pleasure to look forward to and an extra incentive to keep your nose to the grindstone. If your willpower doesn’t cut it, block your most irresistible diversions on your web browser. You can install monitoring programs on your mobile devices, too. Mobile Spy logs what you do with your phone, allowing you to see how much time you spend (or waste) on nonessential activities.

Emails

Answering emails quickly is a plus in the business world. However, every email doesn’t have the same priority. Delete or archive emails that don’t need a reply (e.g. spam, newsletters, receipts). Send an immediate response to urgent requests and major clients. Star or mark as unread lower-priority and non-work-related emails. A recent feature of Outlook called Focused Inbox might make organizing your email simpler for you. The Focused Inbox divides your inbox into two category tabs, displaying only important messages in your Focused tab. Email sorted into the Other tab is out of sight until you are ready to deal with it. Of course, you can move emails from one box to another, and the program prioritizes emails from frequent contacts.

People

Workmates

How do you discourage interruptions while preserving friendly relations with colleagues? One woman was so distraught that she wrote to Lifehacker.com for advice: “Whether I’m in the middle of a task or . . . trying to talk on the phone . . . , these folks keep coming up to socialize. I like them . . . so I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but how can I make them stop bothering me?” Lifehacker responded with some great ideas.

Wearing noise-canceling headphones serves a dual purpose. Even if you aren’t listening to music, which could itself be distracting, you appear unapproachable and busy to your coworkers. They probably won’t disturb you unless they have good reason. If someone is so bold as to talk to you while you have them on, don’t take them off. Tilt them away from your ears to give a brief reply before replacing them. If you pair your answer with a smile before looking away, they should get the hint that the conversation is over without being offended. The second benefit is that they do drown out background noise! If your company doesn’t allow them, you may accomplish the same illusion with your phone headset.

Family and Friends

Lifehacker.com offered three tips to “Not-so-chatty Cathy” that might indirectly discourage your family and friends from disturbing your work time. (1) Make them do something for you. If your partner calls multiple times to chat, ask them to do something for you. “I’m so glad you called back, I forgot to take that load of clothes out of the dryer! Can you do it for me so my shirts don’t get so wrinkled?” With any luck, your partner will rush off to your rescue and you’ll be free to continue your project. (2) Don’t make it worth their while. If they regularly call you at work, they might be bored and looking to be entertained by your sarcastic wit. Instead of providing amusement, be a conversational dud. Lackluster replies might prompt them to ask if anything’s wrong. That’s your opportunity! Explain that nothing’s wrong, but you’re too busy to talk right now. Ask if you can call them back at a more convenient time, and make sure you follow through on your promise. If that becomes the norm, you should be able to break their habit of calling during work hours.

Clients

Getting rid of interruptions from customers is tricky. Offend them or make them feel unvalued, and you’ve lost your bread and butter. The best way to handle it is to make the clients feel that you are busy managing their needs. You might say something along these lines: “Hi Greg. I was just researching the data I need for your project, but I can set it aside if you need me now. Otherwise, can you call and leave a message for me on my voicemail letting me know what I can do for you?” He might decide he’d rather you finish up what you’re doing. You might also delegate some small client requests to your assistant. “Oh, yes! Barbara is ready to take care of that for you right now!”

You

Is it fair to blame all of the distractions on other people? You probably do your fair share of procrastination for various reasons

Daydreaming and Worrying

What can you do to keep your mental focus? When a concern or question pops up, make a note of it so you can take care of it later without letting it preoccupy your mind. Dehydration can sap your energy and concentration, too. Keep a water bottle near your desk and take sips throughout the day to stay hydrated.

Sleepiness

The culprit could be your lunch box. Foods high in fat and sugar can make you drowsy! Almonds, salmon, and kale reportedly boost energy. Set a bedtime for yourself and ban electronic devices an hour before that time to get a good night’s sleep.

Your Work Space

Noise What if it’s not the people but your work environment that distracts you? You won’t get much work done if you are always getting up to adjust the thermostat or yelling across the cubicle wall for your neighbor to turn his music down. In these instances, preventive measures are in order. Wear your noise-canceling earphones to drown out your cubicle-mate’s tunes. You might also find a quiet corner away from your desk, such as an empty meeting room. If all else fails, bring a white noise machine, a device designed to mask unpleasant noise with soothing or pleasing sounds. And if a coworker asks what it is or why you have it, your explanation might prompt them to think twice the next time they talk on the phone or play music in the cubicles around you.

Temperature Dress for work in layers that can be removed or added so that you maintain a comfortable temperature. If it’s allowed, buy a personal space heater for your office. Most heaters double as fans, so you can stay cool in the summertime too.

Whether you work remotely or in a bustling office, distractions abound. Fortunately, you can avoid, reduce, or even eliminate most distractions. Don’t let anything interrupt your mission to apply these tips!

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Please take the poll and share your thoughts in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!

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Our GrammoWrimo Group Novel Is for Sale on Amazon!

When everything is about to change, the air becomes still. The sky turns a nondescript color of gray and people throw themselves into normalcy with a sense of purpose usually reserved for special occasions. They’ll walk through town and wave brightly to familiar faces, laugh a little too loudly, and buy a loaf of bread for dinner. All the while, they’ll readjust protective amulets and spend an extra minute in front of a household lararium, understanding that their reality will soon shift ever-so-slightly from its axis and life will never be the same again. They feel it in the air, and so do I. — Excerpt from Frozen by Fire: A GrammoWriMo Group Novel about the Ancient City of Pompeii

During November 2014, Grammarly gathered nearly 500 writers from 54 countries to write a group novel together online as part of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). We called our effort GrammoWriMo, and as of last week, our novel is finally published!

GrammoWriMo was crowdsourced from the beginning, starting with a poll sent out to participants to let them vote on the theme for our novel. From a short list of historical events, our participants chose the destruction of the ancient city of Pompeii by the eruption of the volcano Mt. Vesuvius.

Next, it was time to get our writers organized. In order to make the project manageable for such a massive group, we came up with 20 story ideas, or vignettes, around the theme of the destruction of Pompeii. A group of writers was assigned to each vignette and given the chance to brainstorm around their topic.

During the month of November, writers contributed to their vignettes using Penflip, an online collaborative writing platform. In addition to the 20 vignettes, we also solicited submissions for our GrammoWriMo short story contest.

Once the writing period was complete, we ran contests to come up with the title and cover design for our novel. We took the submitted text from our contributors and ran it through Grammarly’s automated proofreader, then had a human proofreader read over the text for historical accuracy and consistency.

After months of hard work, our novel is now available for sale as an eBook on Amazon! 100% of the price of the book ($.99) will be donated to a literacy-focused charity. Frozen by Fire is a collection of short stories that centers around the destruction of the ancient city of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The novel features various perspectives on the event—ranging from the viewpoints of everyday citizens, to the experience of an archeologist uncovering the city years later, to a literal bird’s-eye view of Pompeii—creating a dynamic portrait of what it might have been like back on that fateful day in the doomed city.

Click here to purchase our group novel on Amazon!

Is Irregardless a Word?

• Irregardless means the same thing as “regardless.”
• Yes, it’s a word. But major dictionaries label it nonstandard.

Language is a living thing. No matter how many times we say it, it never gets any less true—language does resemble a living thing. It grows and changes, adapting to new circumstances, new words, new ways to use old words, and new combinations of letters and meaning. It’s a beautiful thing, the fact that language is alive. And you can use that fact to console yourself every time you hear someone say the word irregardless.

Definition of Irregardless

Irregardless is used in the same way you would use the word “regardless.” “Regardless” means “without regard,” because that’s what happens when you add the suffix -less to a word.

You might notice here that irregardless also has “regard” as its root word, and that it also contains the suffix -less. So, if there were any logic about irregardless, the prefix ir-, which has also been added to the root word, would have to bear no meaning. But it does, and that’s the problem with irregardless—it has two negations. The ir- prefix means “not,” and if you add it to a word that already means “without regard,” you get “not without regard.” This double negative is what makes irregardless a mess of a word, and an insult to the army of people who are passionate about English vocabulary. Many of them go so far as to assert that irregardless is not a real word.

Is Irregardless a Real Word?

However, there is a problem with the assertion that irregardless is not a real word. For one, it has a meaning. When someone uses it, you know what they are saying, even though you don’t like how they are doing it. Regardless of your dislike, it carries a meaning.

And people are using it. It might make you cringe, but irregardless is in use. It’s been in use for a whole century. You won’t find too many examples of it in respectable publications that employ editors, but you will hear people say it. In fact, it’s used often enough to catch the eye of lexicographers, and it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened.

So yes, irregardless is a word you can find in most dictionaries. And it’s not because the lexicographers working on these dictionaries have betrayed the English language by allowing such a mongrel of a word into them.

Nonstandard Words and Descriptive Dictionaries

Dictionaries today are descriptive. They don’t tell you how to use the language or which words you should and shouldn’t use. Descriptive dictionaries simply note the ways language is being used by people. That’s how words like emoji, clickbait, and meme can get in there, and that’s how irregardless got in there as well.

Granted, lexicographers have a way of noting that some of those, let’s call them unusual words, are not words an educated language user would use in formal discussions. Dictionaries add a “nonstandard” tag to such words, and they stay nonstandard until they gain enough traction to be included among the “standard” words. In case you’re wondering, irregardless is a nonstandard word.

Can I Use Irregardless in a Sentence?

If you want to, no one in this world can stop you from adopting irregardless into your speech and using it as much as you’d like. However, you should expect that when someone is grading or editing your work, it will be marked as a mistake. And you should also be aware that it might not be good to use a word a lot of people rightfully see as very problematic. So it might be best to steer clear of it, at least until it makes a run for standard status. Which could happen. Language is a living thing, you know.

Here’s How to Get out of Meetings with Grace

I once worked remotely for a company that had a regular content editor meeting every Friday. That meeting was the bane of my working existence. We’d all gather on a conference call line starting at 10 a.m. We’d arrive with good intentions, but inevitably no one had an agenda and we’d walk away (sometimes hours later) without having reached any actionable conclusions. The only thing anyone would act on would be to take a few minutes at the start of next week’s meeting to bemoan the lack of things we accomplished with the previous one.

I was required to be at those meetings, although often I didn’t have anything to contribute other than a few futile requests that we get back on track. Any track. I would find excuses to bail whenever I could. (Oops! My cat is trapped in the dryer vent. Okay, bye-eee!) The number of times I was inexplicably “sick” on Fridays was growing suspicious. I’m ashamed to admit that, because I had a headset I could mute, occasionally I’d fall asleep and wake to find myself softly snoring.

According to Inc., ninety-nine percent of meetings are a complete waste of money. And yet, even though everyone hates them, they’re a staple of corporate culture. Knowing how to get out of non-essential meetings gracefully is a job skill that can save you hours of torment and help you get more done.

Just say no to (unnecessary) meetings

Many of us persevere when it comes to meetings because we don’t want to be that person—the slacker who skips the meetings everyone else dutifully attends. But while yawning your way through every meeting might make you feel super committed to your work, it might also make you less productive.

The key to saying no to meetings lies in figuring out whether the meeting is essential for you and, if it’s not, making it known that there are better ways you could be spending your time. Here’s how to wiggle out without damaging your status as a team player.

1Take a “fewer meetings” stance.

Unless you’re clear on the reasons for a meeting from the get-go, question its purpose. Adopt the stance that every meeting should have to justify its existence. Although you shouldn’t insult meeting organizers by suggesting their meetings are superfluous, don’t be afraid to voice alternatives like “Is this something we could handle in email or Slack?” Ultimately, you’ll be a hero if you’re able to reduce the number of meetings your team holds.

Here’s a tip: Some offices are jumping on the trend for having a meeting-free day each week. If yours isn’t one of them, consider it an initiative to work toward. Make sure you frame your meeting-free idea as a push for more productivity and not a whiny rant against the tyranny of meetings. The Harvard Business Review has some advice for making it happen.

2Determine whether your presence at the meeting is essential.

Not all meetings are created equal. Just because you’ve been invited to one doesn’t mean that you’re a key player. And who needs meetings that involve sitting around listening to everyone else talk?

When you get a meeting invite, ask for more details or an agenda. It’s perfectly okay to ask what your role will be. This lets your colleagues know that you value your time and want to spend it wisely.

3Ask for help establishing your priorities

I’m going to share a little secret with you. In fact, this tactic works so well for getting out of meetings that it should be in every worker’s bag of tricks. Simply ask the meeting holder to help you prioritize. Should you put the meeting first, or the project you’re working on? It looks something like this:

“I’m scheduled for the 10 a.m. content team meeting tomorrow morning. I’m working on finishing the [insert big project here]. Would you rather I prioritize the meeting or the project?”

Odds are good that the meeting holder is going to insist you prioritize the project. And, if he or she doesn’t, then you’ll know the meeting really is one you shouldn’t miss. This simple technique has helped me step out of many a meeting so I could focus on getting work done over listening to people talk about the work I should be getting done. Give it a try!

4Push for meeting notes.

Many companies have staff meetings for information sharing. For most players, they involve listening and learning about current plans and happenings affecting the team. You may not have a crucial role in the meeting, but that doesn’t mean the information you might glean from it isn’t important.

A simple change in meeting strategy could make staff meetings something people can bow out of when they have higher priority tasks to work on. Bring up the idea of having someone keep meeting notes at each session so that everyone who’s unable to attend will have access to the information that was shared and any action items that were determined. To keep things fair, the note taking task can fall to a different person each session. (Be sure you volunteer to be the note taker, too.)

If notes aren’t a possibility, show your commitment by briefly following-up with the meeting leader so you can get up-to-date.

5Ask to step out when the meeting no longer pertains to you.

Sometimes, you’ll attend a meeting where only part of the agenda is relevant to you. If you’re particularly busy, it’s okay to request that the team address those pertinent agenda items first so you can bow out when the meeting shifts to topics that aren’t in your purview. Chat with the meeting organizer a few minutes before the meeting to explain that you’re trying to manage your time and prioritize, and you’d be grateful if he or she could tackle your items first.

Here’s a tip: Take a seat by the door. That way it’ll be easier for you to bow out when the meeting is no longer relevant to you. Avert your eyes from the envious gazes of your less meeting-savvy colleagues who didn’t make an escape plan like you did.

There’s no reason to whine or make excuses to get out of meetings. All that’s required if you want to skip the talk and get to the action is to show your team that the company will be better served if you don’t attend. If you want your superiors and teammates to value your time, it’s important to show that you value it, too.

In Between or In-between–What’s the Difference?

In between should always appear as two words. Although inbetween is common, it is a misspelling and does not appear in any English dictionary. Unnecessarily adding in to between is also a common grammatical mistake. As a compound adjective, in-between should be hyphenated.

Between, On Its Own, Is Often the Correct Choice

When we speak, we often add in before between when it isn’t needed. It’s not the worst thing in the world to do, but be careful not to let it creep into your writing. Between can be used several ways as a preposition or an adverb, but the confusion of between vs. in between tends to arise when we use between as a preposition that means “in the time, space, or interval that separates.”

Please have the movers place the bed in between the two nightstands.

Because between already means “in the space that separates” in this sentence, an extra in is redundant. There is no other kind of between than the “in that space” sort; there is no on between, no at between, no through between, and so on. There is no need for a preposition in addition to between.

Please have the movers place the bed between the two nightstands.

Here the preposition between has an object, the two nightstands, and together they form the prepositional phrase between the two nightstands. In cases when between is used a preposition but does not have an object, it will feel more natural to use in between.

I go to the gym on Mondays, on Saturdays, and sometimes in between.

The dog ran off with his prize, while the boy was left with two hot dog buns and nothing in between.

The most important thing to remember is that when used together, in between is never spelled as one word.

A Phrasal Verb Makes Neighbors of In and Between As a Part of a Phrasal Verb

When in is part of a phrasal verb—that is, idiomatically connected to a verb in an indispensable way—it might fall naturally before between even if between has an object. Two examples of phrasal verbs containing in are pull in and drop in.

The Hummer’s owner inconsiderately pulled in between two “No Parking” signs.

Feel free to drop in between the hours of nine and ten o’clock.

In both of these sentences, in functions as part of a phrasal verb and not with the preposition between.

In-Between Should Be Hyphenated as an Adjective

Occasionally,in and between join forces as a compound adjective before a noun in the sense of “intermediate,” and when they do, spell them with a hyphen for readability.

I would grow my hair longer, but I dread that awful in-between stage.

The Rise of the Helping Verb

You hire a fashion consultant to help you redesign your wardrobe. He tells you to get rid of your most recently acquired shoes. You gasp in surprise because you bought the shoes only a couple of days ago. All the celebrities are wearing them. How can they not be fashionable? You may ask the same thing about helping verbs. Aren’t they always in fashion? The short answer is no. New words are always emerging. All types of words, not just verbs, shift in meaning or become obsolete. For example, consider the case of thee and thou. These words were standard a few generations ago. Today, the pronoun whom is in danger of falling completely out of use. Dictionaries eliminate dozens of words every year to make room for new additions. Language is like a living thing, growing and adjusting to changing circumstances. In particular, the use of helping verbs is changing at a remarkable pace. What are some of the major trends and why are they occurring? Here is the story of the helping verb.

Auxiliary means “giving support or serving as an aid.” An auxiliary verb, then, is another name for a helping verb. So, these verbs help, or support, the main verb in the sentence. The three most common auxiliary verbs, to be, to do, and to have, are not experiencing much change. They are called the primary helping verbs. All three of them can serve as main verbs, but they perform special duties when used as helping verbs. Briefly, here is an overview of these popular verbs and their function.

Forms of to be often help the main verb express tense. Forms of to do appear in negative statements, questions, and emphatic statements. To do also helps speakers and writers avoid repetition by standing in for the main verb. The last of the primary helping verbs is to have. When you want to say that a particular action occurred at some earlier time, you use the past perfect tense with the aid of a form of to have: She had already eaten all the pizza when the movers arrived.

Let’s look at the rest of the auxiliary verbs. The modal verbs express ideas such as ability, uncertainty, necessity, and permission. In fact, the term modal means “noting or pertaining to mood.” Some of the modal verbs perform extra duty; they have more than one meaning. Let’s briefly look at how modals function.

Could and can express ability: Jim can bench press 150 pounds. Lina could run faster if she trained with a marathon coach. You can use may and might to represent possibilities: It looks like it might rain today. It may rain tomorrow. Modals such as must express necessity: I must listen more closely next time. Finally, may is also used for permission: You may go outside after you put your toys away.

Did the last example sound a little formal to you? Years ago, using may was the most common way to request or grant permission to do something. Nowadays, people are more likely to use can: Can I go outside after I put my toys away? One case study compared the use of can and may in personal letters. In letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth century, can mostly expressed “personal ability,” or what people were able to do. Because may could convey both personal ability and permission, some phrases were rather ambiguous, as in one historical example: “I begg [sic] of you to let Mrs. Warren send me word when I may attend you.” By the twentieth century, may hadn’t just become scarcer—its definition had narrowed, too. In the letters examined in the case study, it nearly always referred to possibility: “I may come over…”

To be clear, need to and going to are semi-modal verbs. True modal verbs don’t have an infinitive form or a past tense form. They never end in -ed or -ing. Semi-modal verbs sometimes act like main verbs and other times they function like modal verbs. Other modals that seem to be in flux are “might,” and “have to.” In the past, the verb must usually expressed necessity: I must run faster if I want to catch the train. Presently, people are more likely to talk about necessity with going to, have to, or need to: I am going to have to run faster if I want to catch the train. Ann needs to order some mealworms for her lizard.

In the old letters and in new documents, must hasn’t varied much in frequency, but it has expanded in meaning. In the earliest of the letters, must communicated personal obligation and not much else. Over time, writers began to use must to talk about other things. You can view seven definitions on Dictionary.com that show its broadened nuances. Which term replaced must? In the letters, it was “have to.” In everyday speech, “have got to” may be used. Must might have gone out of style as a way to convey necessity, but it is still completely in vogue in modern vocabulary.

In any case, it’s extremely difficult to detect grammatical trends within a few decades. Language is unpredictable. The article “Current change in the modal system of English” explains: “A change measured over a shorter period of thirty years or so, however, will not necessarily be completed in the time period, and it is impossible to know how, when, or even if a particular change will complete.” What’s more, the experts don’t agree on how each instance of the modals should be defined. The same article mentions studies by Jennifer Coates and Geoffrey Leech: “Coates (1983) states that have to and have got to are infrequent as epistemic modals and Leech (2003) claims that must is one of a few modals not becoming monosemous [limited to one meaning].”

So what’s the verdict? Should you throw out the declining helping verbs along with your faux-crocodile plaid loafers? Not so fast. While the data do conclude so far that the frequency of must declined between the 1960s and the 1990s, one of its freshest replacements, have got to, is going out of fashion as fast as it came into fashion. There may be a resurgence of must for expressing necessity, or some other way to express the idea of necessity may emerge. The point is, you can’t predict how fast or to what extent language will change over time. It is much easier to look back at the trends after several centuries have passed. If that’s the case, it will be the job of your great, great-grandchildren to figure out the fate of the helping verbs and fashion fads.