Maximizing Your Productivity by Quieting the Noise

Your mission is to maximize your productivity – to get it all done –, but there’s a big obstacle that sits in your way. No, it’s not that there’s not enough time. The biggest threat to your productivity is that there’s too much noise. Let me explain.

Imagine that you need to have a conversation with a colleague, to share some info with them or to discuss an important issue, so you meet up with them to talk. But, when you find them, they’re in the middle of a room that’s full of people who are all talking loudly to each other, there’s music blasting, and for some reason there are strobe lights too. What are the chances your colleague is going to be able to focus on what you’re telling them enough to respond thoughtfully? What are the chances they’ll even be able to hear you in that kind of environment? Pretty low. 

Sometimes this is what it feels like when you’re trying to be productive – like the whole world is fighting back against you, making it more and more difficult to hear yourself think, much less hear what other people are saying to you. There’s simply too much noise.

What Is Noise?

I know you know what noise is in the everyday sense, but noise is also an important concept in communication theory. Noise, in this sense, is anything that disrupts the exchange of information. This could be loud music, lots of people around, and strobe lights when you’re talking to your colleague, like in our example, but there are three different kinds of noise that can affect and often derail our productivity: physical noise, physiological noise, and psychological noise. We’ll discuss the three types of noise in this post and then look at physiological noise in more detail in the next post.

Physical Noise

Physical noise is the most obvious of the three types, and it refers to anything that disrupts your flow of thought or attention in your physical environment. This includes literal noisy things, like airplanes flying overhead, loud equipment outside your window, or a crying baby nearby, but it also includes a lot more. If a light is flickering in your office, that’s physical noise. If your phone is vibrating in your pocket, that’s noise too. And, sometimes the most deadly of all, if the room where you’re working is just a little too warm, that’s noise. 

It doesn’t have to be sound to distract and disrupt, and physical noise is a load of dead weight in the marathon of your life (like – hypothetically – if there’s a scraping trash truck outside your window while you’re trying to write a post about noise.) 

Unless you have the gift of blocking out the noise and supernaturally staying focused in a distracting environment, maximizing your productivity will require quieting the physical noise around you so you can do your best work. This will probably take some trial and error, so experiment with what will work for you! If you work remotely, maybe you can find a new place to work altogether – trading a bustling coffee shop for a home office, or a failed home office for a library. You have a lot of freedom to rearrange your space to block out whatever noise you’re particularly bombarded with, so try moving your desk or replacing your old lamp or lighting a candle if it helps! If you don’t work remotely, you may have to be more creative in finding ways to quiet the noise. But don’t be afraid to be proactive! (And consider investing in a good pair of headphones in the meantime.)

Physiological Noise

While physical noise is often the most obvious, physiological noise may be the most subtle. Physiological noise covers all the distractions that come from your body. Say you’re heading into work for an 8am meeting, and you’re running on two hours of sleep and two cups of coffee. Maybe that’s a typical Monday morning for you, but, more likely, by 8:30 your body is going to be making lots of complaints. Your brain is foggy from the lack of sleep. Your hands are jittery from the caffeine on an empty stomach. And your empty stomach isn’t happy either. This is physiological noise, and it is productivity’s worst nightmare.

Quieting this kind of noise is so important to productivity that the entire next post in this series will be devoted to it. But here’s a spoiler: building healthy habits is the key. Stick to a sleep schedule, drink lots of water, and move around sometimes too. This sounds obvious, but you should never underestimate the game-changing importance of these habits.

Psychological Noise

The last of the three kinds of noise distracting you from getting it all done is psychological noise, and it shouldn’t be too hard to think of examples. Worried about a hard conversation coming up? Noise. Already trying to coordinate next week’s plans? Noise. Remembering that other project you’re behind on? Noise. This type of noise may be the most difficult to get rid of, because most of the time you can’t do anything about the situations while you’re trying to work. You can’t change a past mistake or address a future issue while you’re sitting at your laptop, answering emails. Managing the psychological noise in your head is a bigger task than simply eating a better breakfast before you leave for a job. Sometimes there’s an easy fix, sometimes it’s a mindset shift, and other times it’s a long road to walk. But here’s a tip for how to start.

Psychological noise is also unlike the previous two types because it actually grows as the other two grow. Physical chaos creates mental chaos. The louder the trash truck is outside your window and the more your head hurts from dehydration, the worse your psychological concerns start to seem too. So if the psychological noise in your mind is drowning out what you need to get done, it might help to check the physical and physiological noise and quiet them down first.

Conclusion

How do you get it all done when you’re working in a noisy environment – inside and outside? First things first: quiet the noise. You’ll probably never get things silent, and, even if you do, most people find silence extremely distracting too. But you can probably get things a little quieter – around you and inside you –, and every little bit helps. Maximizing your productivity starts with minimizing the noise.

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