The Life Hackers
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This was really interesting. It requires registration from the New York Times, but it's worth it. The Life Hackers is a great title and while it may not be completely accurate, it's close.
Gloria Mark is a professor studying human-computer interactions that found herself being constantly interrupted at work. So being a scientist, she decided to study this and found out that people at one company tended to spend only 11 minutes on a project before they were interrupted to work on something else.
Wow. 11 minutes.
Makes you wonder how you get anything done? The more interesting stat to me was that it took 25 minutes to return to the task. Meaning that your train of thought gets broken, you work on something else, or you don't feel like getting back to work.
Your momentum is gone.
At least for me, and apparently there is a whole branch of science devoted to figuring out how to interrupt you in the least intrusive way. After all, if you make the decision if something is worth interrupting you, it's too late. You're already interrupted.
Apparently there is a "science of interruption" that Gloria Marks worked with at NASA and there are quite a few people at Microsoft. There are actually a few pages of the article, which really is fascinating, devoted to some projects at Microsoft.
Joel has a couple articles on this as well: Fire and Motion and Human Task Switches Considered Harmful. there might be more, but these are the ones I remembered.
There were two very neat things that I liked in the article. The first was that people in open cube plans, as in a group without walls (my preference) are interrupted more, but in a better way because your co-workers sense when you are busy and when you are not and "tailor" their interruptions.
The second one is that we don't have a shortage of information. We have a shortage of attention.
Steve Jones
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Very cool and extremely interesting!
btw, the author also posted the article here if you want to save $3.95.
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Sir Bob Geldoff says his productivity is directly proportional to the number of emails he ignores!
He also says that e-mail can be counter productive because the rapid fire responses it triggers can deliver a message with the wrong tone and thereby loose a business deal.
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Email seems intrusive, but we find using an IM client to answer small questions doesn't shift are focus away, given the open cube environment that we have, if you check to see if someone is busy, you will probably interupt them.
Cheers
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I had trouble. It asked for a paid subscription to see the article.
Russel Loski, MCSE Business Intelligence, Data Platform
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use the link that sq95m.. has posted!!!
**ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI !!!** -
Gloria Mark is a genius....reading her article was an interuption and it took me about 25 minutes to get back to work!!
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I once had software coordinator who had a "stream of consciousness" system of dealing with task assignments. As soon as she got an email or a voice mail, she'd hit the "forward" button and cc half the company. We'd all have to drop what we were doing to read this 20 page email thread to figure out what we'd been asked to do, if anything, or listen to a 5 minute voice mail message just as an FYI. She'd do this dozens of times a day. When anyone complained about the frequency of interruptions, they got fired shortly after for failing to meet objectives!
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...if it comes to that, so's this site - an interruption ie...I find that the ONLY thing that works FOR not letting the interruptions affect productivity is what was mentioned in the first article..."a monklike ability to say NO"..If I am disciplined enough to not log on to SSC first thing in the morning (like an addict wanting the daily "fix") - respond to emails only after I've made some progress on my "to do" list - set daily (reasonable) goals and try and get at least half-way there - let the answering machine/voicemail record messages if any & getting to it when "I" am relatively free - etc...then & only then am I able to look back at my workday with any sense of accomplishment...
oh - did I mention what has now become a refrain repeated ad infinitum (not to mention nauseam) - It would not be possible for me to be even half the monk(ess??) I aspire to be but for the fact that my cloister is my home - I seriously think that studies like these should also start including comparisons between the telecommuters and the office-goers...It's time the world got "with it" and realized just how many advantages there're to teleworking...
**ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI !!!** -
Lots of time and effort has gone into studying airplane pilots and how the cockpit environment can either contribute to or reduce the possibility of an accident. This has lead in recent years to the concept of a sterile cockpit. During critical phases of flight (normally any commercial jet flying below 10,000 feet) the cockpit is off limits to the flight crew and no conversation is allowed between pilots or between pilots and controllers that is not directly related to operation of the aircraft. The goal is to eliminate as much as possible any distractions. Seems like this study reinforces that concept by documenting how long it can take to refocus.
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