Let me give you a statistic: It takes the human brain an average of eight minutes to enter a truly creative state. (Fried, Ina. (2005, July). Driven to distraction by technology. News.com. Retrieved on August 3, 2005 from http://news.com.com/)

Now I would like you to think, I know, you have to be creative; I normally do not ask that of you. How many times are you disturbed during the day, once a day, hour, every other minute? If you answered the last answer, you may really need a vacation. But if you answered something else like four times a hour, think about how productive you are in a day. Taking the statistic from above and doing some math, you actually are only productive for little more the two and a half hours during the day and that is if the disruption does not take any of your time.

Think about what these distractions are. They could be new e-mails, instant messages, phone calls, people walking into your office, and any other distraction that you can think of. How can you get some of the five and a half hours that are wasted back? Here are some suggestions by the interruption:

Instant Messages
Have two screen names, one for co workers and another for everyone else. This way when you really need to get work done you can choose who can see you online and who can contact you.

Keep your screen name for work only, do not mix the screen name usage. You could use the above suggestion to accomplish this also. Create another one for friends.

Disable the sound and notifications on the instant message program. When you are looking at your screen, anything that blinks will distract you, especially the little pop ups in the bottom of the screen that tells you someone signed on.

E-mail
Same as having two screen names for instant messaging, have a work e-mail address and a personal e-mail address. Keeping the two separate will help to minimize the distraction of e-mailing all the good jokes and chain e-mails.

Sort the e-mail into folders. This can work great or kill you unfortunately. Be careful that when you sort them into priority folders or anything like it that you actually read the lower priority ones, just do not do it once a week to clean out the folder.

Set aside time to read e-mail. Do not try to read each e-mail when they come in, wait until the time set aside to read them. Now some people will think that they need to see each e-mail to make sure it is not extremely important. From experience normally the extreme importance is communicated over the phone, not instant messages or e-mail.

A little trick that you can do if you want to keep your e-mail program open all day and not close out of it after you are done would be to change the default send and receive setting. Change it to something like 30 or 60 minutes or higher. This way you only have to review e-mail when the program checks for e-mail.

Disable the calendar notifications. No it is not exactly e-mail, but you probably use outlook so you probably use the calendar in it. Only use notifications for things that are really important, like picking your children up from baseball practice, or your anniversary (highly recommend that one, set the reminder to a week before so you do not get reminded five minutes before it). Having to many reminders can just divert your attention, or worse make you panic that you have too much to do. Panic is not a productive activity.

Memos and Faxes
Look through memos and faxes at the beginning of the day or at the end. Do not constantly go to check you're in box for them. If they needed an immediate response then it would not be a memo, it would have been a phone call.

Fax machines have been around for a long time and are very cheap. However, they can distract you and waste time and money. Consider what you go through to fax a document. Open it on your computer, print it, go get the print out from the printer, grab a cover page, fill the cover page out on your desk, get back up to go and fax it, wait for the fax to complete (normal faxing is 1 page per minute), now either refax it because of an error/busy signal, or destroy the pages you just faxed. Consider the time wasted in the entire process and the amount of paper that is being used (not just on your end, consider the receiver also). Consider using the fax feature with in Windows, or a fax server for you company.

Voicemail
Try to have people not leave voice mails. Encourage them to send e-mails. This way you are able to respond to them through e-mail and not through a phone call which many times will start an exciting game of phone tag. Also, this is a better way of tracking what was said, you have a record of the e-mail conversation.

Try to have someone filter the calls for your office so that people cannot just leave a message at will. This causes less checking for voice mails with them being forwarded on to the correct person.

Other Distractions
I have found that having a radio going causes me to get less involved in the conversations that occur in the office. Since I cannot hear what is being said, I stay out of it.

Try not to face towards a traffic area or window, every person that walks by will grab your attention.

Have a limited amount of entertainment in your office. By this I mean toys, there is a difference between stress relievers and toys. If a five year old walks into your office and feels like he does on Christmas then think about the amount of "stress relievers" you have.

These are just some techniques that I have used in the past to get the work that I have done. Productivity is controlled by you. No one can blame someone else for not getting anything done, so you mine as well try to exercise work productivity, and you never know you may actually start to get bored since you are so productive.