Work less, do more

BY NICOLE BLADES

All of us are guilty. Sometime during the day, we decide to ignore our to-do list and email our mates about last night's Celebrity Apprentice. Or we stretch our legs by heading over to the office kitchen, where we proceed to bitch about how crap the air-conditioning is. Or we pause our looming project to get a Twitter fix.

While chilling on the company clock might seem like a working person's right, those mental breaks cost you. Kathleen Alessandro, president of the US National Association of Women Business Owners, estimates that one intrusion - from an email, phone call, text, IM or chitchat - occurs every seven minutes and lasts an average of five minutes. That means up to 68 disruptions a day. That's 340 minutes, or 5.6 hours, gone from every day. To help you make up for lost time, we've come up with 20 ways to avoid time-sucks so you can leave work - and get your life back.

Photo by Women's Health Nov 10, 2011