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Driven to Distraction by Technology
Ant writes "CNET News.com says 'The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for the brains to get into a really creative state. The result, says Carl Honore, journalist and author of "In Praise of Slowness," is a situation where the digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run more smoothly are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks accomplished.'"
Where I work, it's not the e-mail or instant message interrupting me so much as it's the person stopping by your cubicle *in person* to ask a question.
Quit being so quick to find evil in technology.
If I ignore (for the moment) an interruption, then it has less of an impact on my productivity. And some of us multi-task fairly well, which would also reduce the impact.
I do believe that there are many distractions that may take our minds of our work. The phone ringing, the pager going off, the bright blue sky outside with flocks of geese slowly migrating back to their Canadian homes. All these things are distractions that may harm productivity.
But I don't think that productivity is being harmed to such an extent that a fuss must be raised over it. Projects are still being finished, people are still getting paid, and products are still being sold. It's not that there are so many more distractions than before, it's simply that we can quantify (and villify) one particular set of distractions.
Maybe it's just me, but sometimes taking a time out to stare out the window at the horizon helps me feel a lot better about sitting in front of the computer.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
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Set your IM to busy.
Set your mail client to check for new email once an hour.
Switch your phone to voicemail.
If your boss won't let you, then it's an organisation problem, because your boss absolutely needs to understand that this is how to get you to work most efficiently.
And that is why I simply don't answer the phone 80% of the time unless it is a call from somebody that I know would be needing help with a priority project/subproject/whatever. Ditto with emails - however I appreciate that email makes it easier to screen incoming information and quickly decide whether it is worth reading right away.
If I'm deep in thought, off goes the email, and the phone certainly gets ignored.
Work on the stuff you know is important, or at the very least work on the stuff your boss tells you is important. Don't just switch tasks every time somebody adds something to your to-do list. The guy calling on the phone will get taken care of in time. Time management gurus call this taking care of the important rather than just the "urgent." This is the only way things get fixed in the long-term - often the guy screaming for help on the phone is looking for a short term solution.
In fact, I normally prefer email to phone calls. It is less interrupting, and it forces the person who is contacting you to organize their thoughts rather than just randomly spilling them out. Phone is GREAT for conversations, but TERRIBLE for just making requests. Unless you know that the call is going to be very high priority for both parties, I think you're better off just sending an email to schedule a time to make the call, or better still a visit.
But that is just my two cents...
We had this problem in our office, where telephone calls were routed to groups of people. Everybody got distracted and decided upon looking at the caller ID wether to pick up the phone.
Favourite office sport became being the last one to pick up, before the answering machine answered.We descarded the old system and routed all calls directly, forwarding the call quickly (after two rings) to one other phone, if it wasn't picked up. If that one also wasn't picked up within two rings, the call got forwarded to the boss.
We blocked IM at the same time. The changes are appreciated by the employees, who say it's way less stressful.
Gotta check out responses to my /. posting.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Where's the problem? Just disable interrupts while you're managing one, and re-enable when ended. People will keep calling until they don't get some CPU share. Else, the overhead for context switching is known to be terrible. Just be sure to schedule calls from your boss in real time priority, if you don't want to get fired.
42.
YMMV, but I find that if I, for any longer period of time, turn off notifications for e-mail etc (or if I am forced to use my webmail instead of a fat IMAP client or so) I will spend a lot more time polling my webmail than I would have lost due to "push" interruptions. The same goes for slashdot and the like.
I suppose there are parameters that I could vary (get a more interesting job, for one;).
Hmm, it sounds like an overgeneralization to me. "Office workers" is a pretty broad term that presumably encompasses pretty much all white collar jobs. Some jobs have always been interrupt-enabled, such as stock traders and financial analysts, and some are constantly on the phone, like sales and marketing types. Then you have people who are always on their feet, such as teachers and police. Writers such as journalists (like the guy in the article) have traditionally worked in open offices with phones ringing constantly.
This fellow Honore is probably thinking of certain professions such as computer programmers and IT professionals and architects and graphic designers, where you really do need periods of uninterruptedness to get some solid creative work done.
As a programmer, I'm willing to bet that most people in these fields have long since discovered the power of ear buds (and noise-cancelling headphones, my own favorite) to blot out the world around them. To a lot of us, IM and email are just a bit of line noise that we easily put up with. I usually welcome a little interruption now and then, and in fact it helps spur the creative juices sometimes to have a context shift.
Overall I think this article is a bit alarmist, though there's probably something to it in terms of the frenetic pace of life in modern offices.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
"The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for the brains to get into a really creative state."
Hey, I won't disagree that it is very difficult to work with constant distraction. As a Programmer, a SysAdmin, sometimes you have to sit and _think_ about the big picture.
You must pause and consider.
However, the above quote shows quite aptly one of the major flaws with Western Medicine. It seems to think that all human beings are identical.
8 minutes? Clearly this is some sort of average, and an average likely deduced by dubious means. It could be 1 minute for some, 16 minutes for others.. and the type of creativity could make as much of a difference as the person involved!
Of course, let's just boil it all down into a neat figure, instead...
Yeah, I know it is quiet on the weekend. It is quiet in the evenings as well. I used to do this all of the time.
Only one problem with this - eventually this behavior is expected, and essentially you become a slave rather than an employee.
The worst that I remember was a time when I was so exhausted by the weekend, that my Saturdays consisted of lying down to take a nap in the mid-afternoon, and not waking up until about 10pm. At that point, there was nothing to do but just go to bed. Maybe by Sunday afternoon, I was starting to feel somewhat human again, but by then it was time to chuck myself back into the chipper on Monday.
These days I REFUSE to work evenings and weekends any more. Having a life outside of the office is important to me now.
I now have the Friday afternoon rule. If a "crisis" comes up after 3PM on Friday, it couldn't be so important that it cannot wait until Monday.
If I were placed back in a situation where regular work on evenings and weekends were required, I would plan on looking for a new job. Even leaving the industry, if that is what it takes. There is no way I am going back into that hellhole.
I get it, you're working on something and you're trying to concentrate, come up with the next block of code for an intricate function, and some popup email notification for shonky viagra salesman comes up and throws your concentration a little, annoying.
I don't however think that the best solution is to "unplug" so to speak, because I've had the reverse to, deeply entranced in something complex for hours on end, only to find out that it was useless work because I was emailed twenty minutes into the task and notified we'd be taking a different task, that is similiarily annoying.
It'd be ideal if you could set the computer to know what you're working on, say a project tag for incoming communication attempts, and anything related to what you were working on got through instantly with the potential for interruption otherwise it was stowed away without notification until later. I achieve this now just by making assumptions about who will be contacting me with regards to what, but it's a kludge, and the people you expect to not bug you with something unless it's important aren't always worthy of such faith.
A way to let people know that need to know what you're working on without interrupting you, and giving them the potential to interrupt you if they really ought to anyway, that'd be nice. Unplugging is just taking a step back, and there was a good reason we got to where we are to begin with.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
(1) the three minute average is silly. You can work uninterrupted or be in a meeting for an hour - this means you'd need other spans of near constant interruption to hit that average. Most likely this was a survey, "3 minutes" was a choice and it came up most often. People like to complain to inquisitive strangers who are paying attention to them, and you see the events, not the space between them.
(Same problem accurately estimating cloud cover. Here's an exercise: Take a sheet of plain paper. Fold it in half the short way, tear a big circle out of the middle. Open it back up. You have a rectangular paper donut. Tear the round piece in half. Put one half in your pocket, tear the other into about a dozen random shapes and sizes. Lay the donut down. Lay the random pieces into the open hole. Ask passers-by to tell you how much of the hole is filled. You'll get big numbers. 70-80 % coverage. You can prove it's really only 50% - you have exactly half the hole in your pocket untouched.)
(2) the 8 minute ramp-up is almost as silly. Suppose it's roughly right. Office workers are required to be in "a really creative state" to get any work done? Nonsense.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
My boss once had asked me if I could finish a pretty huge, but not impossible, task - by "end of tomorrow". I said "yes, with a good, productive day with few interruptions, that's doable". Day after, he was out of town for a meeting with the customer, whom he had promised this.
Now, my boss wasn't exactly calm about these things, and easily got nervous, so about every half hour, he'd call me and ask for the progress. Around 3 pm, as he once again called me and asked "How's it going? Will you still be finished today?", I told him:
"No. I won't. Unless you hang up that damned phone immediately, and don't call me again. Ever. At least not today." - then I hung up on him.
He didn't call me again, but a couple of hours later, he returned, not very pleased, saying my behaviour wasn't quite acceptable. But he got a little bit more pleased when I told him I was finished...
Moral: don't know if there is one, except that everyone, including your boss, can be told to go fuck off - and if you generally do your job, he'll probably even forgive you.
- Vegard
At Kinko's was the boss (and co-workers) who decided that since I knew how to do everything, anything they didn't know how or couldn't be bothered to do, they would dump on me. Eventually I started telling them things like "you're number 3 in the queue. It's gonna be awhile." They backed off after awhile when I made it clear that once you're in the queue, you stay in the queue until your turn comes, however long that is. I was valuable enough that they couldn't just fire me (though the next manager tried, and he got his ass handed to him by HR when I gave them a heads-up).
At my current job the main problem was people ambushing me as soon as I walk in the door with every little question they've come up with that morning. I've gotten them trained to where they know if I walk in and go straight from my mailbox to my office, I have something to work on already; if I come into the lobby area where they are after checking my box, they're free to drop whatever on my plate. The new trouble ticket system we just installed helps too, as they can enter a ticket as soon as they think of a question or encounter a problem, instead of feeling frustration until I get there. I'm working on getting them trained to realize that instead of coming down 3 floors to change someone's default e-mail client or whatever, I can do almost anything software-based that needs to be done right from my office (and probably do it better since I have all my reference materials and tools for various things right in front of me, to say nothing of direct access to the servers if something server-based needs to be done).
It's slow work, but we're making progress. Next up will be getting them to plug their own Ethernet cables back in when they've been pulled out from the wall (no, I'm not kidding).
-- Old Man Kensey
Unplug your phone. Log out of your IM. Close your mail client. It's so easy. Free yourself.