All employers strive to provide work-life balance – and none more so than fast-growth companies, where there can be a culture of working long hours to meet demand. But what if you could complete the same workload in fewer working hours – simply by cutting out all the distractions in your day?

You might feel that it wouldn't save that much time, but findings from the Cohen Brown Management Group show that workers can lose as much as three to five hours a day to interruptions.

Interruptions from meetings

A Regus study shows that an average of 23% of companies around the world waste time traveling for meetings – a figure that rises to almost a third in Brazil and India. Videoconferencing is an easy solution to connect professionals from across the globe.

Setting a policy where meetings can only last 15 or 20 minutes and have a fixed number of attendees can dramatically reduce time spent in meetings. Once you have replaced the need for lengthy weekly meetings, you can swap them out with a weekly internal status report where employees type a line on their progress.

Interruptions from emails

The average businessperson receives 122 emails per day – not surprising for fast-growth companies where one person is wearing several hats. Even one minute spent reading each email means two hours lost.

Migrating in-house communication to real-time platforms like Slack and Asana saves you the need to forward chains around the office and allows anyone to search for information without asking colleagues.