Helping Creative People Create

Data On The Damage Of Distractions

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TimeSavingsExpert.com has linked to an ancient post (by blogging standards- over 1 year!) that shows a study on the cost of interruptions and distractions among office workers. The result: Scary.

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.

A three minute attention span?! That’s worse than a toddler! But we know it’s true. Distractions are going to be more and more prevalent as the internet advances. The constant interaction with email among workers, coupled with chatting inside email apps like Gmail are potential productivity nightmares.

Yet we’ve created environments for work where distractions are not only permitted, but required. Tsk tsk. But Linda Stone believes that worker’s have a love/hate relationship with their interruption-driven environment. Why? We want to be wanted.

We are so busy keeping tabs on everything that we never focus on anything. This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant pinging makes us feel needed and desired. The reason many interruptions seem impossible to ignore is that they are about relationships – someone, or something, is calling out to us. It is why we have such complex emotions about the chaos of the modern office, feeling alternately drained by its demands and exhilarated when we successfully surf the flood.

The rest of this lengthy article from the Times is an extremely interesting read. You might start to see some scary similarities with yourself and the average worker.

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  • http://www.continuouspartialattention.com Linda Stone

    Great post! We are at, what I believe, will be a tipping point, with regard to how we evolve the way we pay attention. That is, while today, we pay, what I call, continuous partial attention, increasingly, we are longing for more signal and less noise, fewer and more meaningful relationships, and to get to the bottom of things (vs. to stay on top of things). It’s interesting to watch those under 20 use technology. They KNOW where the off switch is. They prefer to SMS vs. deal with intrusive phone calls or burdensome email messages. They will begin to show the rest of us new ways to use the technologies and we’ll discover new ways on our own as we move from “always-on” toward more balanced lives.

  • glen

    “increasingly, we are longing for more signal and less noise, fewer and more meaningful relationships, and to get to the bottom of things (vs. to stay on top of things).”

    I like where you’re going with this. I agree with you in the fact that some of us just haven’t adapted enough to keep up with the constant distractions. Become more efficient in the way we handle them is going to be crucial as more and more distractions become commonplace.

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