Christian Business Concepts
Christian Business Concepts
Death by Distraction: Why "Harmless" Interruptions Are Sabotaging You
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The quiet thief of modern leadership isn’t incompetence or lack of ambition—it’s distraction. We unpack how constant noise steals time, drains vision, and slowly disconnects leaders from the work God actually called them to do. Through scripture, data, and hard-won experience, Harold maps a path from busy to fruitful that any owner, executive, or team lead can follow.
We start with a candid story about setting boundaries that multiplied output, then widen the lens with biblical insight: Mary and Martha on priorities, the sower among thorns on crowded hearts, and the tragic drift of Solomon and Samson. From there, we dig into the hidden drivers that keep leaders scattered—dopamine chasing, fear of missing out, fuzzy goals, people-pleasing identities, missing systems, guilt-fueled workaholism, and ego. You’ll see the modern culprits clearly: email overload, social media loops, surprise meetings, notifications, perfectionism, firefighting, and endless news cycles that masquerade as “staying informed.”
Clarity turns the tide. We outline a simple, durable framework: name your distractions with a short audit, get order with time blocking and the 80-20 rule, concentrate with single-task focus, and unplug to kill noise at the source. You’ll get a sample daily template, practical tips like limiting email checks, turning off nonessential notifications, and delegating fire drills to the right people. We also lean into “eat the frog” to remove the dread that makes distractions seductive, and we reclaim stillness so leaders can think, pray, and decide with intention.
If you’re ready to trade frantic activity for meaningful progress—and align your business with godly success—this conversation gives you the tools and the courage to do it. Subscribe, share with a leader who needs focus today, and leave a review to help more people find the show.
Welcome to the Christian business concepts with your host here. Christian business concepts company successfully company successfully company with your host here.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, Kelly, and welcome to all of you who have decided to download this week's Christian Business Concepts Podcast. I'm your host, Harold Milby, and I've been working with uh Christian and non-Christian businesses alike um for over 30 years. And the reason that I started Christian Business Concepts was to help Christian business owners and leaders find true godly success, which should never be confused with the world's success. They're very different. Uh and uh you now, everything I've learned about leadership principles, I have learned from the Bible. And the Bible's also full of business principles. You know, each week we discuss business principles and we apply those biblical teachings and we apply that wisdom so we can bring glory to God. That's first and foremost, uh, in our businesses and our careers and our personal lives. So today I hope uh this podcast will encourage you, enlighten you, and empower you to be all that God has created you to be as a Christian business leader or a Christian business owner. Now, I'm gonna ask you to please help us continue to grow the CBC family by sharing this podcast uh with um uh you know with four or five other people, and be sure to put the link to this podcast in a in a post to your uh on your Facebook or your LinkedIn page. That that would be that would just be wonderful. Now, this week I want to give a big shout out uh to the city of Lakeville, Minnesota, here in the United States. Uh they are new listeners and they have downloaded a lot of episodes this week. And uh we just really appreciate you folks there in Lakeville, Minnesota. We appreciate all of you who download, and many of you download every single episode every week, and we appreciate that, and we hope that we can earn that trust that you have in us to help you grow as a leader and as a person. Now, today I want to talk about something that I think affects about 95% of all business leaders. I I want to say probably all leaders in general. Uh, it's something that steals time, talent, uh, and treasure from your calling. And make no mistake, you are called. And today I want to discuss with you how this topic, which is distractions, are the silent killer, I think, of businesses, business leaders, of vision uh that leaders have. You know, when I when I was a pastor, I remember the first time this became a serious issue for me. I was at my second church, and we had doubled in size several times uh over the course of about 18 months. And the biggest contributing factor was I was a people-oriented person. I'm talking about contributing factor to to these uh distractions. Uh, but I'm a people-oriented person and I'm unstructured. Now there's four types of people. There's there's um uh people-oriented that are structured, and then people-oriented that are unstructured, like myself. And then there is um task-oriented people and structured and task-oriented people that are unstructured. So for me, I had this combination of being unstructured and being people-oriented. And so I could be studying for a sermon, I could be working on something, working on the vision of the church, any number of things I could be working on. But if somebody came into the outer office, which is where my secretary was, that was her office, right outside mine. Uh, I would hear somebody come in and start talking. I would immediately get up. I want to go see who it is, I want to talk to them, see how they're doing, and I might spend 20 minutes to 45 minutes talking to that person. And then I would go back into my office, but it would take me 30 to 40 minutes to kind of get back on track and pick up where I left off. And finally, one day my secretary came into my office and she asked if she could do something to help me. She said, I want to do something for you. She said, I want to keep your door closed and you don't come out unless I come and knock on the door. No matter what person you hear out here, I want you to stay in your office. So I began to give her some direction as to how I wanted things screened and people screened. And then we implemented her plan. And honestly, it was awesome. I was really surprised at how much I could get done in a day when I wasn't allowing myself to get up every time I heard somebody. And uh then I also realized how many people were distracting, uh, you know, distracting me during the day. You know, when you look at the Bible, you look at Luke chapter 10, you know, verses 38 through 52, that's the story of Mary and Martha. And Mary and Martha were uh at their home, and Jesus came to their home, and uh Martha was in the kitchen and she was working and she was cleaning, and but Mary was sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to him teach. And Martha came in and said, Jesus, do you don't you care that Mary's left me alone to get all this work done? And uh Jesus said, Martha, you've you're distracted by a great many things. And Mary has chosen that thing that is the best. And so he he was talking about priorities, but he was also talking about distractions. And so that's a great example of distractions. Matthew 13, 22 talks about the sower of the seed, and it and it says this it says, the seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful. So again, we're talking about distractions. You know, you can be distracted by by the by the world's wealth or or or by um uh you know what goes on during life. You know, we can get distracted by that. Solomon in the Old Testament, King Solomon, uh, great king, one of the wisest men on the on the planet at the time. And he was distracted by foreign and ungodly wives. And so instead of marrying these godly uh Israelite women, he would minute, he would, he would marry these foreign wives, these foreign women who were just completely ungodly and also worshipped idols. You know, Samson, another example, he became distracted uh by Delilah, and he allowed himself to be distracted by her. The children of Israel were distracted by the past and what it was like in Egypt when things got really hard. They wanted to go back to Egypt. They got distracted. They also got distracted when they got to the edge of the promised land, and they sent in the 12 spies to spy out the land. Two came back with a really good report, and the ten got distracted by the giants, the ten got distracted by all the other things. They both saw, or all 12 saw the same thing, but only two did not allow themselves to get distracted by those things. And and in a uh Forbes online magazine article recently, it's uh entitled An Epidemic of Distraction: How Focus Leaders Create Momentum. And the author's name was uh uh Gene Stafford. Uh and and according to uh her, there's some studies out there that found that 79% of U.S. workers admitted that they could not go a full hour without being distracted. And 59% couldn't even sustain focus for 30 minutes within that hour. There's another study that found that that knowledge workers lose roughly 28% of their time to distractions. And so that's that's about 581 hours per employee per year. So distractions have become a really problem issue within many organizations with leaders. And uh, so let's let's talk briefly about why leaders let distractions steal their time and take away from them. Uh there are several root causes. Uh, number one is what we call a dopamine addiction, it's the quick hit trap. In other words, people are looking to get things done quickly and easily because they hit the they get this sense of accomplishment when they do something that's completed and it creates dopamine uh within our bodies. And it's like it's like a high, it's like a natural high. Uh so you know, this the Harvard study says that 40% of the waking hours spent uh in a in a work day can the mind can wander 47% of that time. So, you know, a dopamine addiction is one. Another is the fear of missing out. We're afraid of missing out. That was my problem. You know, the reason I want to get up and go see somebody and see who it was was because I was afraid I was gonna miss something. And so a fear of missing out is another. Another is a lack of clarity. If you don't really have a clear, what we'd call North Star or a clear number one goal, then everything feels urgent when not everything is urgent. And so you you've got to have this. You know, leaders with written goals are 42% more likely to achieve the things that they want to achieve just because they have goals. So it's important that you have clarity. Another is people-pleasing identity. In other words, I'm the hero who fixes everything. Uh, you know, they want they want to please everybody. And uh so that's a that's another reason. Another is they don't have any systems. They have no SOPs, they have they just don't have any system to get things done. So everything is you're easily distracted uh when you don't have any kind of a system. Another is guilt and workaholism. So, you know, people are workaholics, they they feel guilty if they're not doing enough. And I struggle with that myself sometimes. I feel like, well, I'm not doing enough. I'm not doing enough, and I really kind of give myself a hard time, and uh it causes me to easily get distracted. Um, you know, in other words, if I'm not busy, I'm failing. I I'm trying to strike the word busy out of my vocabulary. I don't want when people say, How are you? What's going on? I don't want to say I'm busy. Because just because you're busy doesn't mean you're productive. A lot of people are busy, but they're they're not very productive. And so, you know, I I really want to make sure that I don't allow guilt or that workaholic, you know, lifestyle uh make sure it doesn't get a hold of me. And and then the last one is ego, ego and control. In other words, well, nobody can do it as well as I can. Well, there's a lot of things like that that may be true that you can't do, nobody can do as well as you do, but that doesn't mean that you need to do them. You need to give somebody else a chance to learn to not only do it as good as you, but maybe do it better than what you do. And so we we have to watch that ego and that control because it can lead to a lot of distractions. Uh so let's look at some of the top what I would consider to be modern day distractions. Um, number one is email overload. Email overload. According to some studies, that alone costs employers$50,000 a year in lost focus.$50,000 a year. Uh another big one. And on average, the email is like 13 hours a week that's lost. Social media, that's another one. That's about nine hours a week that's lost. And then you have unplanned meetings, meetings that you have that pop up that are not planned, and they interrupt your day. And so now sometimes that can't be helped, and I understand that. Uh, especially if you're a business leader but you're not the owner. Sometimes the owner will cause you to have to drop everything and go into a meeting. So I'm not talking about that, but I'm just talking about things that you do have control over. Uh, another distraction is again just trying to please people. Uh, there's another one. I call it the shiny object syndrome. In other words, you you just see something, it's interesting, and then you just it takes your focus and it takes your attention. It's just the new shiny object. Uh phone notifications. Uh I turn uh I have very few phone notifications on my phone. Very few. I used to take notifications for every app, for every single thing on my phone. It is such a distraction. So I turned off all my notifications. There's only like one, I think, and it's for the weather, it's for emergency weather. That's the only notification that I have. Um, another is perfectionism. And I say this all the time perfection is the enemy of accomplishment. Perfection is the enemy of moving forward because you're waiting until everything is perfect before that you move forward. So you have to look at that. Another is uh what we'd call team firefighting. So you want to get involved in putting out all the fires. And if you have a team of people, you need to train those people to be the firefighters. You don't need to be the firefighter for everything that goes on in your business or in your department, in your company. Uh, and then the other is news. People scroll down, they're looking at news all the time. And I got to tell you, the iPhone and other smart devices, not just that brand, but any kind of smart device that you utilize, it is such a distraction because news comes so easily on these devices. Whatever, however, you want to get your news, you can get it right there on your phone. It is so easy to get. And that becomes a distraction even for me at times. Uh, so that's something, and and when we're talking about distractions, I I fight this every day just like you do. So I'm I'm I'm just saying that we have to be very smart and very purposeful on how we deal with distractions. Uh, and then another is personal errands. Now that's not a big deal, but it can be if you let it get out of hand. So you have to watch that. So personal errands. So, you know, distractions to me, they fall into one of these following categories. It's either digital noise, because distraction to me is noise. And so it's digital noise, you know, social media, email, that's digital. There's people noise, so that's people coming in, interrupting, doing the things that that you know that are just taking time away, taking your focus off what you were working on. Uh, so there's people noise, there's internal noise, and that's you, that's internally in you. And then there's material noise. There's just physical things that take and break your focus, uh, no matter what it may be. I I work a lot in my home office. I have a small dog. He wants to be in my office and he wants to be in my lap. And it's like, dude, you you can't I can't work when you're in here running around, you're pestering me. And I love my dog, but you know what? He's a he's a distraction. Uh so you know, whatever those things are, you know, the whatever those those things can be, that noise that's distracting you, you know, it just it's a noise that draws our attention away, it draws our focus away, it draws our time, takes our time. So what I'm saying is stop feeding the noise. Stop feeding the noise. So anyway, we look at why do stra distractions win. Why why do they win? Well, distractions are immediate. And when you look at something and you're working towards your purpose, your purpose is kind of distant. It's far off. You're trying to work towards a goal. You know, the Bible says in 1 John 2 16, it says the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes. He talks about the fact that these things are immediate pleasures. And the immediate pleasures are typically the things that distract us the most. So that's a reason why distractions win sometimes. You know, your brain is wired for instant gratification. You know, so a notification or an email or a social media ping, it just delivers this dopamine because it gets it gets something right now. It it's it's instant gratification. And uh, you know, the Bible says set your minds on things above and not on earthly things. Again, just trying to stay focused. Another is distractions are easy. Typically, distractions are easy, but if you're disciplined, that at times is hard. It's hard. You're looking far off, and yet there's something real easy right here, and so that becomes a distraction. Uh and the Bible says Proverbs 12, 15, it says, the way of a fool seems right unto him. And uh so that's a that's that's another one. It's because they're easy. Um you know, I I I would encourage you to practice this two-minute rule. In other words, if a task takes less than two minutes, then do it now. If it takes less than two minutes, do it now. And and this kind of kills the micro procrastination, right? Um another thing is distractions are loud, like I said, it creates noise. Now, it may not be physical noise, but it may just be something that rattles in your mind so much that you have to deal with it. But the Bible says in Psalms 46 and 10, he says, Be still and know that I am God. Don't let the noise of distraction uh take and dominate your life and interrupt you. And you know, when you look at news and and and notifications, they're they're just noise. It's just noise. And God talks about stillness, but we rarely create that space to listen. And that's what you have to do. You've got to protect your space. You know, the Bible says the Lord will fight for you. You need only to bestill, be still. That's in Exodus 14, 14. So again, it's important. You know, uh maybe you just take 10 minutes a day to just be silent. No phone, no noise, just pray, just listen, journal. You know, I think those are important things. And distractions are endless. That's another thing. They're endless, they're they're always there. There's distractions every day if you allow them. There are every day. And and your time is very limited. You know, Psalms 90 and 12 says, Teach us the number of our days. You know, so the internet, the internet is infinite, but your day is not. And without boundaries, these distractions are going to consume your most precious resource, which is time. You know. Ephesians 5 16 says, Redeem the time because the days are evil. It's important. Uh so what you want to do is in those situations is you want to um, you know, what you want to do is is take and um block your time on your calendar. Block time for specific things, and then you don't let those things enter, don't let anything else interrupt that block of time. If you write, if you're a writer, then you block time. You know, if you I want to write an hour a day, okay, block that time. What time are you gonna write? Between seven and eight, or maybe your best time is between nine and ten, whatever it is, block your time and don't let anything interrupt that time. So you need to begin to write down as we look at this four-phase solution uh for dealing with distractions. The first phase is you gotta name your distractions. What are they? Look and find out what they are. You know, do uh distraction audit, okay? Uh journal those. Put it put a journal down or write or get a journal and then start writing down what they are. Look at what your top three triggers are. What is your top three triggers? Maybe it's a sticky note somebody puts on your desk. Okay, well then don't let anybody put sticky notes on your desk. But what I'm saying is that begin to name your distractions. You know, you need to focus on this hit list so that you can start to eliminate um these distractions. So that's that's the first thing that you need to do. Uh the next thing that you need to do is you need to get some order. Okay. Again, we talked about blocking time. Uh you know, Jesus blocked his time. If you really look at it, what he did, he he took time away. He got away by himself. And uh so he he blocked time. He understood what was important, he understood what wasn't as important. And you yourself, you can practice that 80-20 rule, that that that Pareto principle that says 80% of your results come from 20% of your tasks. So if you want to look at like a calendar, uh here's an idea for a template for you. So, like, for example, you know, and again, these are just examples. You you come up with it yourself, but say from 6 to 8 a.m., that's your deep work. That's that's your revenue task. That's what's going to make you money. That's from 6 to 8. Then from 8 to noon, maybe you have team uh meetings or just you know, meetings that you need to have. Do that from 8 to 12. And then from 1 to 3, do some deep work again. But maybe this is more involving strategy, looking at strategies. And then from 3 to 5, do your admin, do some of your emails. Uh, do that maybe, maybe for 30 minutes at a time. Do it a couple of times. Uh, you know, and I'll be honest with you, I don't that very seldom do I get an email that can't wait 45 uh uh 48 hours to respond to. Now I try not to do that. I want to be professional, but to be honest, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that comes across my emails. It's like I could wait for a day or two to answer that. So what I'm trying to tell you about emails, don't live in your emails. I check my emails two to three times a day and that's it. I wouldn't check them more than that. You know, that's every that's just every few hours. If you check them three times a day and you work nine hours, uh, you know, you're checking your emails every three hours. Folks, unless you're the president of the United States, I don't think you have anything that pressing that you have to to get right on. So then the next phase is you need to concentrate. Concentrate on a single task. Let me tell you something. Multitasking is overrated. I'm just telling you that. You know, it's just overrated. You know, you don't want to multitask. I tell you what, there's times I take my phone, I put it in the desk drawer. I turn the ringer off and I just put it in the drawer, just as if I don't even have a phone. Because that's the other thing. Most of my phone calls, they're not that urgent that I have to know about it right now. And if they can't get a hold of me by phone, they'll get a hold of me by email. You know, and so I I just I think you have to really watch and concentrate on a single task. You gotta be like a sniper, you gotta be laser focused, one thing at a time. You know, uh Bruce Lee said, the martial artist, he said, the successful warrior is the average man with laser-like focus. I think that is powerful. You know, Paul says in Philippians 3 13, he says, This one thing I do, I press towards the mark of the prize of the high calling. And so he's focused on one thing. Again, you know, let's concentrate. If you're gonna keep from being distracted, concentrate. And then phase four, you gotta unplug, you gotta kill the noise. What whatever it is, you gotta kill the noise. Um, you know, your your inbox, let me say this your inbox and your email, that's not your to-do list. Don't confuse those two. Your email inbox is not your to-do list. Don't confuse it. And let me say this busy isn't productive. Again, I think I said that earlier. But being busy doesn't mean you're being productive, but being focused is. Uh so you know, you look at your emails, like I said, you look at them maybe at 10 a.m. and look at them at 3 p.m. Um, you know, I would encourage you even now that for social media, don't do any social media for 30 days. Try to wean yourself on it. You know, just try to try to try to wean yourself away from that, right? And then, you know, the Bible says in Matthew 6, 33, it says, but seek ye first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So, you know, do the hard things first. It's called it's called the eat the frog principle. You know, if you've got some things you're dreading to do, get those knocked out. Because I'll tell you why. When the hard things are in front of you, you are more um you you will more than likely allow distractions uh to enter into your day because you really don't want to do those things. Those are the hard things. And so you allow the distractions to come in. You welcome them almost. So get the hard things done, get them out of the way. And then that way the distractions don't mean as much, they don't help you as much, they don't provide as much for you. So it's like the eat the frog principle. You do the most dreaded task first, and it really eliminates the mental drag of avoidance. You know, uh Jesus teaches us to prioritize the kingdom first. And in business, that means tackling the task that aligns with your calling even when it's hard. And that's that's what you have to do. You you just have to tackle the hard things first and uh and look at that. You know, distractions are not always seen as distractions, but as we've discussed these principles today, I hope that you've recognized the potential destructive power that these distractions can have. And I'm confident that each of you um will begin to deal with distractions and see them for what they are. So, Lord, we come before you right now, Lord, and I thank you for each and everyone who has listened to this podcast today. Lord, please help us to recognize distractions and overcome them with your word. And Lord, help us to focus on you and then focus on those things, the important things that will bring true godly success in our business, uh in our careers, in our families, and in our personal life. And Lord, we thank you for that, and we give you glory and honor for it in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thank you again, each and every one of you, for being a part of Christian Business Concepts Podcast. And we hope that this has been a blessing to you. If it has, please share it with two or three or four other people. And again, be sure to post a link uh on your your uh as a post uh in your LinkedIn and and in uh your Facebook pages. That would be a big help and that would be a big blessing to us. Well, thank thank you again for being a part and allowing us to be a part of your personal growth plan. I I really appreciate it. So until next time, remember, Jesus is Lord and He wants you blessed.
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