According to Inc, the average office worker is only productive for two hours and 53 minutes in a typical eight-hour work day. That means that over five hours are spent on non-work related tasks. And why shouldn’t they be? The average workday is filled with interruptions from other coworkers, inefficient meetings, delays in responses from remote team members, and unexpected tasks that distract you from more important projects. Below are three tools you can use to get some of the distractions out of the way so more of your day can be spent on your job and less can be spent waiting for things to happen.

Virtual Assistant

If you’re constantly falling behind on the administrative tasks of your job, it may be time to find a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants do part-time administrative jobs from home, such as sending emails, scheduling meetings, or managing user provisioning software. About seven in ten workers admit to multitasking during meetings and important tasks, so why not make your work time more efficient by passing off your housekeeping to an assistant?

Chatbot

You can’t be in the same room with all of the members of your team all the time. If you’re collaborating on a project with a remote team, it gets even harder. Using a professional Chatbox function (like Cisco Chatbot) allows you to maintain the flow of conversation and let coworkers know what you’re up to even if you can’t meet face to face. Using an advanced user provisioning software service like Cisco Spark Bot
also integrates phone and video calling for those conversations that are best left out of the chatroom.

Cisco BroadSoft

As more work happens virtually, it makes sense to move your workplace into a cloud-based system as well. Using a cloud-calling and contact center that integrates with your user provisioning software allows you to integrate your work into one seamless system. Experts agree that work will continue to move into the remote workspace, so setting up the infrastructure to have everything in the Cloud now will save money and time in the long run.

UC management and onboarding is the first step to make your workplace a more efficient place to be. While there’s no cure as of yet for the distractions of social media and phone calls from your kid’s school, integrating a few tech savvy solutions will mean that you can spend more of your day doing the things that attracted you to your job in the first place.