How Interruptions Destroy Your Work Flow

It used to be the case that if someone wanted to interrupt you, they required the courage to do so in person, by telephone or by letter.

Emailing, texting, mobile phones, voicemails, pagers, etc give us a great plethora of options to get in touch. If response from any of these is slow the sender will often try a second method, and wonder why the first did not work.

A study that watched a dozen information workers for three days, and noted how many times they were distracted, and for how long. The study found that on average, they archieved only 3 continuous minutes of work before being diverted from it (University of California at Irvine study - see http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16guru.html?ei=5088&en=2864cc65d74cefb8&ex=1287115200&pagewanted=all).

“Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.” Gloria Mark, researcher.

- Time Saving Expert