Let’s face it – if you spend a lot of time at work, you spend a lot of time with your colleagues. Of course, you have some coworkers with whom you actually enjoy spending time, while others, shall we say, you’d prefer to see a little less frequently.

Maybe you find one of your colleagues a bit annoying or perhaps you have an office bully in your midst, always criticizing and taking credit for others’ great ideas. Is there an energy vampire in the office, often interrupting you and asking for your help? Or maybe a coworker simply reminds you of your overbearing Aunt Mildred. Whatever the circumstances of your challenging colleague, here are five simple strategies for learning to play nice in the sandbox.

1. Right Turn – If your colleague says something hostile to you, release your resistance and say, “I can see how you would think that” or even, “I agree with you” or “yes, it’s true that I did that.” You completely diffuse a conflict when you don’t fight back. Look for a kernel of truth to agree with and then see if you can find a solution, if necessary, from a more grounded place.

2. Take 5 – A breathing exercise is one of the quickest, most effective ways to calm yourself down. If your colleague has pushed your button, excuse yourself to the bathroom and try this simple technique. Relax your shoulders and breath in for the count of five, hold your breath for the count of five, and then exhale through your mouth for the count of five. This will clear your head and calm your body so you can move on with your day.

3. Joy to the World – Try sending your colleague good wishes. Although you may not be feeling overly kind and generous towards them, try wishing them good health, peace, and happiness. Chances are that they’re struggling with their own insecurities and personal demons, so spend a moment in the morning thinking, “May you know peace” or “I wish you a happy day.” When you open your heart with compassion, you begin to feel more joyful.

4. Teacher’s Pet – Consider that this person has been sent to you as a teacher in your life. Could it be that you’re supposed to learn more patience, more tolerance? When you find yourself feeling frustrated with your colleague, ask yourself, “What could I learn from this experience?”

5. Remember This – When your colleague is really getting your goat, remember why you are working at this particular job. Maybe you’re putting in your time so you can climb the proverbial ladder. Maybe this is work that you actually feel is part of your life’s mission. Or maybe this job simply provides the important function of paying your bills. Try to keep the bigger picture in your mind’s eye so that you can have perspective on the lesser annoyances.

Try these simple strategies and notice how your relationships begin to improve. Remember that you cannot change the colleague, but you can change your own reactions and responses. And when one person starts to play differently, the whole sandbox dynamic begins to change.

For more wisdom and resources from Ashley Davis Bush, please visit her site www.ashleydavisbush.com.

So if you must multitask, rest assured that you can still improve your productivity by minimizing interruptions. Interruptions to your work flow have a similar draining effect as multitasking, but perhaps it is even more pronounced, since an interruption comes more suddenly and less voluntarily. Interruptions can also come from multiple sources and can be shockingly frequent. Some data suggests we might be interrupted as much as 56 times per day.

Gloria Mark, who researches multitasking in the workplace, studied two West Coast high-tech firms and found that employees spent just 11 minutes working on something before being interrupted. Each time a worker is distracted from a task, it takes 25 minutes to get back to it. That is if they return to the task at all. Mary Czerwinski , an expert in interruption science and researcher at Microsoft, found that 40 percent of the time employees end up being distracted away from the original project when the interruption ends.

While perhaps you cannot ignore all interruptions at the office, you can minimize them. And you can also quit interrupting yourself.

Practical ways you might minimize interruptions:

• Disable pop-up notifications for Outlook and other applications.
• Silence your ringer and allow unexpected incoming phone calls to go to voicemail.
• Check incoming messages, emails, tweets, and posts on an interval schedule of your choice.
• If you have an open door policy, close it for an hour a day or when working on a deadline.
• Experiment with a different working schedule; you may find you get more work done early in the morning.
• Experiment with a different work setting; try a library, conference room, coffee shop, or a park bench.
• Schedule weekly meetings with your team where you field questions, instead of answering them as they arise.
• Think ahead: brainstorm ways to quickly end an interruption made by the overly chatty coworker with too much personal news.
• Instead of leaving Gmail/TweetDeck/Facebook/news-site-of-choice open all day, limit it to mornings or late afternoons.

Know when to use these strategies. You don’t want to become the office recluse or unreachable, but when work needs to get done, be aware of what you need to do to allow that to happen.

If you have been a constant multitasker, this may take some time for your brain to get used to focusing. You may find that even when you close everything down, you still have urges to click somewhere or check something. But if you persist in practicing to focus, your ability to concentrate will come with time. Every time you give in to an interruption, you train your brain to remain on high alert and in shallow thinking mode. But every time you are able to resist, and keep your focus, you are training your brain engage with your work in a deeper way.

This post was originally posted on the Intuit QuickBase Team Leadership Blog.

One well-known way to be more productive is to quit multitasking.

While there are some people who can multitask, unfortunately, you are probably not one of them. That is not to sound harsh, but new research is finding that about 2.5% of the population—supertaskers—have a rare ability to attend to two tasks simultaneously. This is excellent for those who are in that category, but beware if you are not and you attempt to multi-task anyway. Your performance is likely to decline significantly, by as much as 30% and you may wind up getting less done than if you had set out to focus on one thing at a time. Pay special attention to this if you consider yourself an avid multitasker; research at Stanford found that people most likely to multitask have the least ability to do so well.

“What most people refer to as multitasking, I refer to as ‘switchtasking.’ Why? Because the truth is we really cannot do two things at the same time – we are only one person with only one brain. Neurologically speaking, it has been proven to be impossible. What we are really doing is switching back and forth between two tasks rapidly, typing here, paying attention there … Keep this up over a long period of time, and you have deeply engrained habits that cause stress and anxiety and dropped responsibilities and a myriad of productivity & focus problems.” -Dave Crenshaw, author of The Myth of Multitasking

You might be multitasking if you:

• Work on a project at home while you spend time with family.
• Play Angry Birds on your cell phone while you are on a conference call.
• Edit your blog post while you talk to a client on the phone.
• Take an incoming call while you are driving down the highway.
• Think about your project while you attend a meeting.
• Keep an open IM session in progress while you answer emails and plan your day.
• Answer Tweets as they come in while you check things off your to do list.

Break the habit!

• People first. If you are spending time with another person, whether it is over the phone or across the table, give them your full undivided attention. You may think you are able to divide your attention well, but it is often not the case and it doesn’t go unnoticed by the other. We all have limited attention and if you push it to its limit, something has to give. You may be able to form complete sentences still, yes, but perhaps your empathy takes a dive. You may hear the words that are being spoken, but maybe you are not listening to the deeper meaning.
• Catch yourself. Make it a game to catch yourself multitasking for the next week or so. How often do you do it? When do you do it? If you are able to do this easily, take it to the next level and monitor your performance. Do you do both things equally well? What about relative to when you give each task 100% of your attention?
• Shut it down. Mary Czerwinski observed workers at Microsoft and found they juggled eight different windows at the same time and would spend twenty seconds looking at one window before flipping to another… in 1997. How many windows (and tabs!) do you have open right now? How many programs are running as you read this? If you want to be maximally productive, shut it all down except the one that you need.

This post was originally published on the Intuit QuickBase Team Leadership Blog.

Another simple example is triathlons: I don’t participate in triathlons, but if I did, I can assure you that swimming would be my limiting factor. Thus, if I wanted to improve my triathlon performance, there would be diminishing returns if I worked on my running speed, while taking a swimming lesson would improve my performance dramatically.

Knowing your limiting factor can help you figure out where you fall short, and where investments in developing a skill will pay off the most. Often times, we stumble with personal development efforts because we are trying to do too much. As the saying goes, “he who chases two bunnies catches neither.” And on top of our hectic day-to-day schedule, this leads to burnout or disinterest in making a change in the first place.

The solution to this is to work on one limiting factor at a time. Personal change works best when you can focus 100% on one habit. So focus on what will have the most impact. Once you tackle it, you can move on to the next challenge. Chances are, simplifying your leadership abilities in this way will have a dramatic impact on your achieving your goals.

This post was originally published on the Intuit QuickBase Team Leadership Blog.