Does your workday include too many distractions? Research tells us that you are in good company. While email traffic exceeds 306 billion messages a day, it translates to office workers receiving approximately 120 emails a day. So, if you are spending two minutes on each message, and that's four hours or roughly half the workday - with the additions of texts, alerts, and various notifications, there's little time left for focused work.

How Can You Improve Productivity?

Given the alarming statistics on primary schedule interruptions, how can we improve this situation? Two key productivity strategies from time management coach and author Elizabeth Grace Saunders include: setting up a personal system for responding to emails and reducing the number of meetings on your schedule.

Here is Saunder's straightforward approach to conquer email overload: set the expectation that you will only reply to email once or twice a day.

Although this may be easier said than done, once she developed a personal system of responding to email just once or twice a day, it enabled her to stay on top of correspondence regularly without having it interrupt her.

• Saunder's approach, "I block out 1-2 hours each morning to clear out my business inboxes. Then for the rest of the day, I am free to complete projects. I send emails when necessary, but I try to only scan my inbox a couple of times a day and only respond to truly urgent emails. Otherwise, they have to wait for my morning email purge."

• For her clients stuck in meetings and looking for ways to shorten their hours, taking them away from meaningful work, the quickest route begins with meeting management.

That means setting up fewer meetings, being part of fewer meetings, and becoming conscious of meetings' length and frequency. A simple tip to adopt: Some individuals change their standard meeting time to 30 minutes. Taking a closer look at the schedule can also lead to weekly meetings being reduced to biweekly or even monthly.

How Can You Increase Your Focus Quickly?

To increase our ability to focus, researchers suggest both boosting our ability to concentrate and reducing distraction. In his book, "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life," Nir Eyal agrees and shares several clever time-management strategies to help us stay better focused. Here is a short list of ways to reduce distraction when working on the computer: Use one screen, one browser window, and one computer program at a time. Peeling back another layer, Eyal reminds us to keep our physical and virtual desktop tidy.

If you are looking for easy strategies that increase your ability to concentrate, Eyal recommends exercise, meditation, and spending time in nature as they can all help boost cognitive control.

To hear more of Nir Eyal ideas, view his timeless talk 'Indistractable: How to Master the Skill of the Century' at the Habit Summit, where he describes a new model for managing distraction.

Next Steps and Additional Resources to Help You Focus

Our leadership group at Mindability views the habit of planning your schedule ahead of time as an essential way to know the difference between traction and distraction.

What is your favorite productivity tip? If you have one that is working well, please add a comment in the section below and join the conversation.

Our research at Mindability also tells us that productive leaders search for answers and meaning. Please continue your search and learn more about productivity and focus today at www.mindability.com and follow us @mindability