What are quiet hours?
Quiet hours mean that you block out a part of the day (between 30 minutes to 4 hours). During this time, you can encourage working in silence by asking your staff to switch off (or place on silent) their phones, emails, and social networks. It helps the worker focus entirely on the task or project that requires their undivided attention.
Cancel the noise around you.
There is so much noise around you today. The biggest noise today is social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram in which you receive notifications day and night from your friends, and you keep on checking the comments.
Whenever you do some work, your attention breaks because you receive notification on social media and this happens again and again
Soft bank implemented an amazing rule in the company that 12- 3 noon little before the lunchtime and after lunch there were Quiet hours. During these quiet hours,
- No one will talk to each other.
- Google chat will be used to send an important message to each other in the office.
- No one will go to some other colleague’s seat to talk.
- No meetings were allowed except urgent and critical meetings where a customer is being called for a meeting.
- Full-fledged 100% focus on single work at the same time.
- Employees were clearly asked to keep their phone on silent or airplane mode.
As a result, the team’s performance increased in terms of concentration and generating tech savvy ideas for the product.
Another story goes with Intel’s Quiet Time Programme. This tech giant experienced the benefits of quiet time after their famous experiment. They moved away all the meetings, phone calls, and every kind of distracting alert for four hours every Tuesday morning. It was a huge success and the company reported a surge in productivity and employees’ emotional state.
Advantage of quiet hours
Better Performance Output – Optimal level of effectiveness on any task is about concentrating on one thing at a time. It means that when a person is decluttered from any secondary tasks like checking out emails or filling out performance reports, he or she will be able to perform main tasks better. Imagine a chef who cooks 5 dishes at a time, making 3 of them taste average. The same goes for every industry: the more tasks workers have at the same time, the worse is the performance output for every one of them.
Reduced Stress – Prolonged stress might develop into the chronic one. Quiet hours might be the solution to unload the burden of many tasks that have burning deadlines. Making workers feel less overwhelmed from professional responsibility improves their emotional state. In turn, that means calmer focus on the important tasks for longer periods of time throughout the whole week.
Improved Thinking – To make your team think transparently and with extra creativity, quiet hours will definitely make difference. Freeing up your team members from the airstrikes of information for several hours a day will give them more space to think about new ways of solving ordinary tasks. That would lead to better professional engagement in the workplace.
Implement the strategy of quiet hours in your life
Find at least 3 hours for you in which you sit silently without checking any notification and do one thing at that time. This can be any three hours -early in the morning 4-7, during daytime or in the evening.
Ideally, quiet hours should be during the daytime because it’s the time you receive a lot of notifications and you have to talk to so many people your family, friends, or others.
If you learn to focus during the daytime, you will succeed very fast in your life. You have to start from half an hour and slowly increase the habit to one to three hours every day. When you start implementing quiet hours, you will feel that:
- You can manage your time easily.
- You have a focus on problem-solving.
Write “Quiet hours” at your work area.
- Do one thing, take a big A1, A4 or A3 sheet and write “Quiet Hours “on it take a printout and stick on the wall of your room place, college or put it as wallpaper of your laptop or phone. It will give a signal to your brain again and again that you have to implement quiet hours today.
- Use Google calendar daily for 3 quiet hours during which you won’t listen to some other person, and you do the work only before or after these quiet hours. These three hours should be followed by you for planned task without any kind of distraction.