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It starts with an innocent tap on the shoulder — a colleague asks a brief question about an upcoming deadline. No big deal, right? Two conversations and four emails later, you’ve officially wasted almost an hour.

I’m not here to tell you the story of how companies big and small fail to acknowledge the importance of using proper collaboration tools. The cat is out of the bag and has been for years. The market simply isn’t mature enough to take the plunge. What I want to share with you today is the typical scenario where office hours become pure chaos due to simple distractions like the one mentioned above. I’m 100% sure these will strike a chord with fellow office workers far and wide.

Scientifically proven

Research has shown that when someone interrupts you from a task, it takes about 15 minutes to fully re-ignite your attention span for that particular task. In other words, if you’re busy composing an email and a colleague asks you to help him with something, when you return to your writing it takes a quarter of an hour to get the same neurons firing the exact same impulses (ideas) back and forth.

Distractions occur every day. Especially in the office. Recent surveys show that 80% of employees are interrupted more than 10 times every hour, with 44% saying they can’t count all of them. I ask you this: do these numbers reflect your own experience in the office? Chances are the answer is yes.

Many times, harmless interruptions lead to other distractions. A quick exchange with a co-worker can rapidly turn into 15 minutes down the rabbit hole. Regardless of what caused the disturbance, we all go through this on a daily basis. Plus, we too distract others with our nonsense as well.

The (black) magic behind interruptions

Typically, an interruption occurs when information isn’t located in a centralized place or people in your organization are not able to find it fast enough. Or simply because it’s easier to ask an expert. Imagine walking into a huge grocery store trying to find a special type of cheese without any signage. Searching aisle by aisle is very similar to what finding information is like when it’s trapped in shared network drives and email inboxes.

Focus is the heart and soul of productivity. Focus is delicate, especially when success demands it not just from one person, but an entire team. Charging towards a common goal is difficult when work is scattered through various data storage mediums. In most cases, decisions, deliverables, and team alignment revolve around meetings in many companies. We dislike it as much as everyone else. Yet, we’ve made it our business to solve this issue.

A communication and collaboration app like Hubgets puts the team’s information centralized in the cloud, makes it searchable, and accessible for use in daily assignments. It brings together instant messaging, voice and video communication, and presence – all in the browser. When the right people exchange the right information, things run like a clockwork orange.

Communication flows, experience stays. How’s yours?