Jason Fried: Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work

TED 2010
Jason Fried: Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work  (script)
Summary
Employers expect that employees do great work in their offices. However, employees think that they want to work without their offices. They probably want to work in their house, in the library or the coffee shop, and think the train is better than the their office. Or even if in the office, it's really in the morning, really late at night or on the weekend.  
Employers think that they have many interruptions when they do the work in those places. They can have the TV, they can go for a walk, there's a fridge and they can use many kinds of social network: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, because no one sees them.
However, those are like smoke breaks. The real problems are the Managers and the Meetings called the M&Ms. It's not chocolate. The Meetings suddenly stop their work. It interrupts them also and it tends to lead to another meeting. If ten people use one hour for the meeting, ten hours are lost. This should be changed to onlt few-minutes with two or three people involved.
The interrupted work can't be fixed like your sleeping time. Thus, you feel that you couldn't do great work today, despite you were in your office for a long time like your sleeping time was interrupted.
The speaker gives you three suggestions. First is to make “no-talk Thursdays.”It means that nobody in the office can talk to each other just in the afternoon or one Thursday. Second is to switch active communication to more passive models of communication like email and instant messaging. It is because you can replay to it when you're available. And third is to let your company cancel a meeting if you possible.
You'll find that those will really  work and something that you thought that you had to do is not necessary.  
Words in this story
provocative /pro・voc・a・tive/prəvάkəṭɪv/ causing annoyance, anger, or another strong reaction.
snooze / a short, light sleep, especially during the day.