Most of us who spend our time online will find that we get distracted often by the huge range of online activities and applications that are now vying to get our attention. There are plenty of productivity tools that will help you avoid these distractions but ultimately you spend your time working in an environment where some serious entertainment is only ever one click away. Here is our top 10 list of distractions online…

Skype

A large percentage of us use Skype to instant message each other and to help us work remotely but more often than not long conversations can ensue that drift off topic and take far longer than a simple phone call would have taken. Once you have built up a large bank of contacts there is also the added distraction of people popping in online/offline every couple of minutes and there always seems to be somebody who just wants to chat!

Twitter

Most of us will have some sort of desktop client working in the background as we go about our daily work and you can be sure that when you are in between chores the first thing you will be sure to do is pop in and see what is happening in the world of Twitter. Once you are in you will inevitably spot a couple of links that will take your fancy and head off for another bout of distraction. The fact that you probably don’t even know most of the people persoanlly that you follow makes this distracyion even more surprising!

Facebook

Just like we used to head down for a coffee or pop down to the pub to socialize we are now doing most of it online and one of our first ports of call is inevitably Facebook. With an average of 13 Pageviews and 28 minutes per day spent of Facebook you can see how people get hooked as soon as they log in. The fact that Facebook is becoming more and more a part of the fabric of the web through their Facebook Connect platform and other efforts means that you will probably be spending even more tim there in the future.

RSS

The fact that all the best content that you have already subscribed to is being sent to you automatically means that as soon as you open that reader you are in for a whole lot of distraction. The only way of avoiding the massive treat that is the content is to simply not open the RSS reader you use as to do so spells a serious amount of time wasted and the likelyhood that you will end up surfing off to lots of different destinations through the links in the blogs and articles you read.

Flash

There are now millions of little flash games and tools online vying for you attention. The chances are these will have been funded by brands and companies who are keen to get your attention and with some having massive budgets you can be sure that these are effective at snagging your attention the odd time. Not only can these be destination sites but the fact that there are millions of engaging widgets around the web on 3rd party sites only adds to the problem.

Newspapers

You would probably never go to the shops and buy 5 newspapers in one go but the fact is that you can have access to 1000s free online which all contain the same articles. You are only ever a couple of clicks away from reading content written by professional journalists on all your favorite subjects. You would never sit in the office during the day reading a printed newspaper but you would have no problem doing so online.

Spotify

It depends from person to person if you can work with music playing but certain people even thrive with the right tunes banging out. Unless you have spent hours setting up playlists or don’t mind listening to albums and covers you will face the problem every hour or so of finding some new music to listen to. If like us everybody in the office listens to communal music you will lose even more time trying to agree on what you should all listen to and debating who has the best taste in music.

YouTube

With over 20 hours of footage being uploaded to Youtube every single minute of the day thee is no shortage of video content for you to check out on what is effectively the 4th biggest search engine in the world. You will more than likely end up here consuming content such as sports highlights, movie trailers or the latest music videos and the fact that they have related videos on every post means that you will spend even more time getting lured in.

StumbleUpon/Digg

Although these sites are excellent for helping you to find the best content on the web they can be massive time wasters and it is more than likely that very little of the content will be work related. The fact that both these services are now available on your toolbar means that you are even more likely to click into them and start a vicious circle that ends up with you distracted from your real work. The only excuse for using either of these sites was if you were a blogger looking for the latest sites or content.

Email

Although you more than likely use email for work on a consistent basis it can be one of the biggest time wasters if used incorrectly. With threaded messages in services such as Gmail people will often use email just like Instant messaging now with up to 10 messages in a thread to decide the simplest of tasks that could be sorted with a 30 second phone call.

What are the sites or services that distract you the most?

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