You have just returned from lunch and you have a single task to complete between now and five o'clock. The task is well within your capabilities and you have a clear run at it, with no scheduled interruptions like meetings to take you from your work. You are like the pilot of a land-speed record vehicle, with nothing but the flat sands of Daytona Beach in front of you. You want to get from A to B as quickly and smoothly as possible, but there are bumps and potholes along the way that could slow your progress. Here are some of the distractions that could knock your efforts off track.

The unwelcome visitor
You are off to the worst possible start. No sooner have you got into your rhythm than the office wag approaches with a cheery wave. He has the funniest joke ever that you simply must hear and he proceeds to tell it as you work. It is a fruitless exercise as you have to concentrate on your data entry and so are unable to appreciate the joke, and the bits of it you do hear cause sufficient distraction that you have to go back and double check those entries.

A good joke can be an uplifting ray of sunshine that breaks through the grey clouds of routine, but common sense should prevail as to when is an inappropriate time to tell one. A gag reeled off in the works canteen, or a quick one-liner at the water cooler are fine, but when you are working you should make it clear that a fire drill is the only interruption you will acknowledge.

The ringing telephone
Your immediate reaction is usually to pick up the receiver and say hello. But stop and think: do you know who is calling? It may be that it is just a client being courteous enough to let you know they received the email you sent, but on the other hand it could be a client with a discrepancy that needs your attention. You would then have to stop work and hunt out the folder containing the inaccurate document, and then go through the figures with him. Can you really afford to leave what you are doing and spend time on the phone?

You have caller ID, voicemail and 1471 to help you keep track of who has called. Use these to their full extent and check out any messages or missed calls when you take one of your regular breaks from the glare of the screen. Learn how to be the master of the telephone and not its servant.

The task you should have delegated
Having banished the office clown and ignored the ringing of the phone you can now get down to work, but not for long. A colleague comes in to remind you that an email relating to another project must be sent before close of play today. It is bad enough that you had forgotten about this task, but worse, you could have quite easily delegated it to someone else. Now your valuable time is to be eaten away as with a sigh you minimise Excel and maximise Outlook.

Careful planning and a well organised to-do list would have brought this task to light in time for you to delegate it to someone else, leaving you free to tackle the task in hand. Keep on top of your workload at all times so you know exactly what is to be done and nasty surprises like this do not drop in unexpectedly to lunch on your valuable time.

The mislaid item
I did say at the start of this article that the task you are performing is well within your capabilities. This comfort zone could be eaten away though if your organisational skills are lacking to the extent that you have to spend time searching for material needed on the project. This could be in electronic form, where, for example, you have misplaced an important file, or in physical form where you can't find a pen to jot something down.

When you're searching you're not working so try to maintain a level of organisation that cuts this type of time wastage to a minimum. Brush up on your organisational skills and introduce reliable systems to your file storage so that retrieval becomes as easy as picking daisies.

That smooth path that you envisaged when you embarked on this task is beset by several obstacles that could slow you down. Taking steps to avoid these obstacles is the key to achieving your goal. We cannot stretch the hours in the working day to suit, so effective time management is becoming an increasingly important factor in making the best possible use of that chunk of time between nine and five.