Make sound your productivity ally

- Each of the five senses have a tremendous impact on your ability to stay productive in your workspace. Sound in particular can pull your attention away, or give you more focus, depending on how you have things set up. For instance, you might be distracted by conversations that are taking place around the office, or noises that are happening outside, or even if you have a home work environment, you can be distracted by noises throughout the house. I want to give you three options to consider when it comes to shaping the sound in your work environment.

First, let's consider music. In my book, The Myth of Multitasking, I talk about the difference between switchtasking and background tasking. Switchtasking is when you're trying to perform multiple attention-requiring tasks at the same time, and background tasking is where something mindless or mundane happens in the background. For some, music is background tasking. It's a nice background to the workday that helps them stay more productive. For others, music is switchtasking.

It pulls their attention away. They analyze it, they think about it too much. I fall into that category. When you think about using music in the workplace, consider its effect on others. It might be making some people more productive, but it's making others less, so I recommend if you listen to music, use headphones. This leads to the second area to consider, which is white noise. White noise is a constant sound that doesn't draw attention to itself.

Think of a fan, or the sound of a waterfall. For many people white noise helps them stay focused and blocks out the sounds around them. You can use headphones also to listen to white noise in a way that doesn't disturb others. I recommend that you just do a simple search for white noise generators, and you'll find many free resources online that will create white noise for you. The third option is just silence in general. Creating as little distraction through having as little noise as possible.

This is actually the hardest option, and the most expensive. When you start to look into what is required to soundproof an office, you'll realize that this is a significant investment of time and money to create silence, but it can pay off. A simple way to start the process is by adding more rugs to your room, or drapes around your office. These things have a deadening effect to reflection and echoes in your office. You also may consider investing in headphones or earbuds that have active noise cancellation technology.

They're consistently drowning out constant sounds, such as if you're on a long flight. By looking at these three options, you hopefully will find some areas in which you can improve your sound work environment, and if you do that, you'll be able to find more focus, which will lead to more time and more control of your workday.