Recently I did some executive education with high-potential managers from a large health care system. Not surprisingly these days, during the session as well as on breaks, and even when they were supposed to be working on tasks in groups, people were checking their messages, texting others, and doing work unrelated to the class. Of course, sitting at a table ostensibly working with others while looking at your PDA is impolite, as it signals that you aren’t that interested in your immediate colleagues. Moreover, this multitasking must invariably retard learning because of a lack of concentration and focus and, for that matter, could hinder task performance. Maybe we ought to create some Blackberry/iPhone-free zones where people can pay attention to what they are doing and effectively interact with each other.
The research literature says a lot about these now-ubiquitous interruptions in our daily lives — and I am right to be concerned. One study found that just being notified you had an incoming message, even if you chose to ignore it, disrupted task performance. Another study[1] found that any type of interruption changes the pattern of work, even presumably helpful interruptions such as those that provide new information relevant to the task being done. That study also found that people who were interrupted while doing their work experienced a subjectively higher workload, more stress, greater frustration, more time pressure, and felt as if they had expended more effort than people not interrupted.[2] Given the pervasiveness of interruptions in today’s work world — through e-mail, cell phones, and so forth, it is no wonder that people feel more stress and time pressure even though, by many objective surveys, work demands have not actually increased that much.
So what to do? Heidi Roizen, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist, reads and answers e-mail messages only once or twice a day instead of having her e-mail system constantly on and distracting her from what she is doing. Other people, believe it or not, actually turn off their cell phones. Nuria Chinchilla, a professor at the Spanish business school IESE and an activist for work-family conciliation who has affected laws and organizational practices all over the world, will not only turn off her cell phone but take her office phone off the hook when she is involved in an important meeting. This simple action signals to the person she is interacting with just how important that person and the meeting are. No wonder Chinchilla is so influential in Spanish politics and gets so much accomplished — her meetings, receiving her full attention, produce more results with less time and effort.
Just as technology has helped cause the problem of interruptions, there are various filters and “attention managers” that have been or are being developed to mitigate interruption costs.[3] Some research has shown that when interruptions occur matters a great deal in their effects on task performance — interruptions between parts of a task are much less disruptive than interruptions that occur while performing a subtask.[4] So interruptions could, in theory, be timed to be less disruptive and technology could ensure that task sequences were completed before new messages or other interruptions were permitted.
Or you could do what I do — eschew a lot of the most intrusive technology completely. On a recent trip to Europe and Brazil, a colleague asked me how I could get so much done and be so organized without a cell phone or PDA. My reply: precisely because I don’t have one, and am therefore able to better control my work environment to maximize focus and concentration. You can actually get a lot more done if you do one thing at a time until you either complete the task or get to a natural break point — constant interruptions and multitasking require you to continually “restart” your work.
Some people believe that the younger generation, raised in a world of multiple simultaneous stimuli, is less bothered by interruption than those less accustomed to having no time to concentrate. But there is, as yet, no evidence that interruption’s effects on task performance or work stress varies by age.
My advice: if you’re an employee, get control over your technology so that it works for you instead of against you. Research suggests that people vary in how self-knowledgeable they are about what makes them more or less productive. Become sensitive to how interruptions affect your productivity and adjust your work environment accordingly. And if you’re a manager, consider holding meetings in which interruptions and distractions are banished. One company has pitcher of water in which cell phones that ring during meetings get dropped. Maybe then the meetings can be shorter and less frequent, because people can concentrate on what they’re doing and also better remember the decisions they have taken.
[1] E. Cutrell, M. Czerwinski, and E. Horvitz (2001). Notification, Disruption, and Memory: Effects of Messaging Interruptions on Memory and Performance, in Interact 2001 Conference Proceedings, Tokyo, Japan.
[2] Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke. The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress, available through Gloria Mark’s website or from gmark@ics.uci.edu.
[3] James M. Hudson, Jim Christensen, Wendy A. Kellogg, and Thomas Erickson (2002). ‘I’d Be Overwhelmed, But It’s Just one More Thing to Do:’ Availability and Interruption in Research Management, CHI Letters, Vol. 4, Issue 1, 97-104.
[4] Piotr D. Adamczyk and Brian P. Bailey (2004). If Not Now, When?: The Effects of Interruption at Different Moments Within Task Execution, CHI Letters, Vol. 6, Issue 1, 271-278.
