Were you to drop a penny piece down the gutter, it probably wouldn't affect you terribly badly. You might not even notice. Replace that penny with a pound coin, and perhaps it might look a little more serious. Make that ten pounds, and you're probably going to be rather annoyed to say the least, perhaps genuinely disadvantaged as a result.

The penny still seems insignificant. But what if you kept losing pennies? Before long, you might have lost a pound's worth, then ten pounds' worth - all the while just dropping the single, little, irrelevant coin, one at a time. Negligible losses, though apparently unimportant in themselves, can become increasingly serious if they keep happening - and, unlike individual large losses, are harder to detect and thus harder to address.

However, it's not just money that comes in small denominations. If you're hard at work, and an interruption stops you for a few seconds, well, it's just a few seconds. But if you keep losing a few seconds here, a minute there, at frequent intervals throughout the day, you'll find it can add up to a lot of wasted time - and to tasks not being completed satisfactorily or on schedule. And just as anyone would take steps to deal with delays of an hour or two in their day, so it's every bit as important to pick up on and address those small parcels of time lost.

Of course, as with the negligible financial losses, the odd small interruption might not be as easily identified as a major delay. Yet there is an easy solution, a simple method for tracking them: for a couple of days, perhaps a week, you can keep a note of everything you do in the work day. Perhaps mark hours and half hours on a piece of paper to divide up the time, and mark down all activities - whether necessary or not - but leave nothing out. It might seem a nuisance to be filling it in, but once you're done, no end of diversions, interruptions and hold-ups will most likely be scattered about the page amongst the regular work.

So, what kind of interruptions might you be looking for? Well, one of the most common and pervasive nuisances is something that can be very useful: the email notifier, that little box which crops up in the corner of the screen (perhaps with accompanying sounds) to let you know a new email has been received. Now, if you're waiting for an important message to arrive, you may need to be aware of it as soon as it drops into your inbox - but unless there's something specific due to arrive, you probably don't need it, and you're probably amongst the millions who end up wasting significant amounts of time during the day by reading every low-priority email as soon as it arrives. Switch the notifier off - your work matters more. Instead, schedule times for checking your email that won't be disruptive, and stick to the schedule; you are the one in control of your time, and you shouldn't be handing over that control to anyone who decides to send you a message.

And that really is the key: you are in control of your time. You have the power to stop it being wasted. Countless offices have their staff doing unnecessary tasks, or necessary tasks in a highly inefficient manner, just because 'it's always been that way'. This is never an excuse; if you're having to interrupt work on an important task for something of less consequence, you need to take control of the situation and either stop doing the less relevant work entirely, or make an arrangement with colleagues apportioning this task to a suitable member of staff who will always be able to complete it without hindrance.

Similarly, many offices will have materials - such as stationary, equipment or information - kept some distance from the people who need them. The location probably made sense at some point in the past, but if it now requires individuals to get up and walk around the room or the building in order to find something that should be easily at hand, then it makes sense no longer; keeping the office organised with a considered layout will waste less time and be substantially more effective.

All of this can help ensure that you remain in control of your time. But it still doesn't guarantee that you'll use the time as effectively as you should. It's important to rid your workspace of distractions - magazines, mobile phones, social network sites, an entertaining view out of the window... anything which will give you the opportunity to do something other than the task at hand. It might also help to ensure that colleagues know when you're busy with an important task, so that they might hopefully avoid disturbing you.

Small distractions that crop up throughout the day can easily add up to hours of lost time over the course of a week. Identifying and removing these seemingly minor details ought to be an integral part of your approach to work - after all, neither you nor the company benefit from time spent doing nothing in particular that could be used on an important task. Time is precious; wasting it is wasting a vital business resource.