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Study Finds Instant Messaging Helps Productivity
MojoKid writes "Researchers at Ohio State University and the University of California, Irvine conducted a telephone study by
randomly surveying individuals employed full-time who use computers in an office environment at least five hours per week. They netted 912 respondents, of which 29.8 percent claimed to use IM in the workplace 'to keep connected with coworkers and clients.'
Neither occupation, education, gender, nor age seem to have an impact on whether
an individual is an IM user or not. The study theorizes that using IM enables individuals to 'flag their availability.' Doing so can limit when IM interruptions occur. Even if an IM interruption comes when it is not necessarily convenient to the recipient, it is 'often socially acceptable' to ignore an incoming message or respond with a terse reply stating that the recipient is too busy at the moment to properly respond." Also another study recently found that water is wet, and a third study found that most studies waste money.
Until you work for a boss who uses it to deliver every missive, task and piece of brain barf that he wants to spew upon his or her workers. My wife works for such a boss. The man IMs her and her team so many times each day that you would think he's an IRC bot that went insane and took over their IM system!
Where email is passive, and more formal, IM allows a boss to act like he or she can just sit there and chat at you all day telling you what to do. It's perfect for micro-managers. Where they used to be expected to write out an email with tasking, send it out and then expect a reply later, they can expect results right here, right now. The result is obvious: stress. Lots and lots of stress for the employees of a micro-manager with IM.
In my opinion, IM should be discouraged in the work place. If you want to send tasking, doing it by email or something formal like that. If you need to talk to someone in the same office, for the love of God, just go to their office and do it. If you're too busy to get up from your desk to do it, you're probably too busy to take time off to chat over IM. Yes, yes, there are exceptions, but generally speaking, that's true.
I move around a lot every day, and my availability varies depending on where I am, and who is trying to IM me. IM's from a coworker or business contact are different than say, IM's from mom or a friend. I modded my IM client to change my status depending on where I'm at, so everyone I interact with can figure out whether or not it's a good time to ask me a question or just chew the fat.
I still occasionally get inappropriate messages, but it's pretty uncommon. Usually they're from someone I don't chat with often and they haven't figured out what all my statuses mean yet.
FYI the script is a cron job that runs every five minutes, and tries to figure out what my WAN ip address is (and sometimes narrows it down by LAN address too) and updates my status, assuming it's not set to something custom already.
Also, sometimes people have something they want to tell me but don't really need to discuss. When they see I'm busy they'll just IM me a one-liner with what was on their mind, ending with an indication that they are not expecting a reply. So at least for me, IM is extremely effective and efficient communication whether I'm at work or at home. It allows me to stay available to everyone without unwelcome distraction.
I wish I could do this with my coworkers' cell phones, omg so tired of a coworker getting continuous calls from relatives/friends while we're trying to get something done, HERE is the real problem!
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I think, if you pay heed to what is going on, that the most productive people, are usually also the stupidest.
The hardest most productive animals are usually nothing more than what we term "beasts of burden" under the direction of an intelligent being.
Cattle can work hard and produce a lot... yet the farmer is smarter than them (and often eats them when they're no longer productive), farmers are productive, but the workers in the city are 'smarter' than them, because they eat what the farmer produces but work half as much to buy what the farmer works year round to produce. Bosses are even less productive than workers, but they employ workers and milk them dry, making bosses "smarter" than employees. BANKERS are even smarter than all of them, because true bankers do not work at all, and fleece entire countries. In fact, through inflation and debt instruments, bankers produce POVERTY, therefore "negative wealth", and yet they make a killing (literally and figuratively) running entire nations into the ground, with the nationals' own consent.
Therefore, lets not pretend that what makes you smarter also makes you more productive. Harnesses may not make horses and oxen smarter, but they certainly become more productive. Being a "good" beast of burden is NOT a result of tools that make one smarter, but of tools that make one more "productive".
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
I can't stand interruptions when I'm trying to figure something out. My email client does not notify me when new email comes in, my IM is fairly unnoticeable in the corner unless I look at it, and I thankfully don't get many phone calls, and often ignore it anyway when it does ring. Now I have IRC and IM open all the time, but I can manage those kinds of interruptions much easier because I hit them when I'm at a point where a brief interruption won't bug me or disrupt my thinking. I guess the easiest analogy is reading a particularly interesting book; at a paragraph break or chapter break I can look up, talk to someone for a moment, or get a drink. However if someone came up to me and broke the "spell" I was under because I was in the middle of a paragraph, it's frustrating, and can ruin the experience.
It's quite common for me to forget to eat or put off washroom breaks for several hours when I'm in the middle of something. Someone poking their head in my office during one of those moments would probably cause me to lose all concentration for a good 15 to 30 minutes afterward, but if they were to send me an IM and I could get at it a minute (or even 15 seconds) later than they would have poked their head in, it wouldn't cause any issue at all.
There's no "might want to try that" to it -- some people just think and work differently than others. I'm not special or anything like that, but just because you have managed to organize your thoughts on paper and can handle interruptions doesn't mean that that method works particularly well for me. I generally recover from interruptions just fine, but people tend to interrupt me at points where it's not a good time to be interrupted, and that causes particular frustration, especially when it has happened for the third or fourth time that day.