Comments

Jan 02  |  Micheil said:

What is equally astounding is that there is a team of scientists who have studied workers and how long it takes from the to get distracted — self imposed or not. I fear that of the study you mention will lead employers to ask their employees to work longer, uninterrupted, believing that this makes for a more “productive” worker. What about quality of work? What about worker satisfaction? What about the urgency of the work that the employee is tending to? So many factors behind these numbers could not be rated or captured in a research paper or statistical analysis. I think a better solution is to have a work environment where people get along well, have truly human relationships, and are happy in what they are doing. I’m not sure how you’ll measure that, but I bet the company would be successful. Of course, you have to define what success is. Money? Happiness? Value to society?

Defining an employee lies far beyond productivity. For every $588 billion lost to worker distraction, how much money is being made? What is the revenue of these companies?

Comparing distraction to marijuana? Are you serious? That should tell you how useless in nature the research and analysis are.

Jan 05  |  Nathan Zeldes said:

Obviously, HP did not do a comparative study of distractions vs. Marijuana; they characterized the performance on IQ tests of knowledge workers under constant interruptions, which gave a value, then commented that a separate previous study by someone else showed that smoking pot causes a reduction that happens to be 2x smaller. Presumably they added this observation to draw more attention, but why would this make the research and analysis useless?

Jan 05  |  Micheil said:

Thanks for your response, Nathan.

Comparing work-day distractions to marijuana definitely takes away from the study’s credibility. If they want to draw attention to their data they should just publish something with merit. Marijuana. C’mon. That actually makes me chuckle. “If pot smoking lowers your IQ by 5 points and distractions can lower your IQ by 10 points then distraction is twice as bad as pot.” That is an abuse of the transitive property. If the authors want attention why don’t they include an as-of-yet picture of Shiloh, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s baby?

If anyone finds out that Intel’s new multicore line card of processors enable more multitasking, hence more chance for distraction — I fear that analysts will rate Intel at SELL.

Did HP define base-line of behaviour for “production”? without these so-called distraction? Is it reasonable to expect a person to put a nose to the grind stone for eight hours a day, taking two fifteen minute breaks and an hour for lunch during that time? What kind of work habits would be required of the employees to erase this $588 billion loss?

So let’s talk productive. You have a person who assembles engines for Porsche. They assemble one engine a month. You have a person who assembles engines for Kia. They assemble 28 engines in a month. Both work a solid 8 hour day. No talking. No email. No potty break. Who is more productive? Which company is better? Which employee is better? Which company is more profitable? Which employees efforts have more impact on the world? What about the husband/wife of the employee — how happy are they?

Productivity. Look, I’m grounded in reality: I know that we have to have general measures of what a person does in day’s work. But it is this exact corporate rhetoric — the study of productivity — that draws deep sighs from the gallery. I don’t believe this study does anything other than provide fodder for discussion over coffee. And I bet someone ends up talking about it during their work day when they should be producing!

Jan 06  |  Josiane Feigon said:

Excellent post and pretty scary considering we need to reach an audience that has a 3-second attention span. On my blog, I hosted a podcast discussion on “desktop distractions” and it confirmed how many distractions workers are struggling with today and how they must learn to stay focused on say NO to interruptions.

Jan 08  |  Reza said:

A paper that I found to be very interesting regarding the Info Overload discussion is this http://www.bul.unisi.ch/cerca/bul/pubblicazioni/com/pdf/wpca0301.pdf

The section ‘Countermeasures against Information Overload’ (pg 21-24) was particularly useful.

Jan 10  |  Eleanor Wynn said:

The UCI study was based on a small sample, and I know the primary researcher well. She did not intend for the results to be normative. Some tasks require surfing and multi-tasking, some tasks require concentration. There is a “do not disturb button” on the chat application we use at Intel. And answering chat requests correlates highly with manager satisfaction. M. Cziktsentmihalyi, who has done the key positive psychology work on “flow states” does not necessarily say that you can’t gain flow across multiple activities. Let’s take housecleaning—flow is a matter of momentum across many small activities. The same is true with many “getting things done” activities. Engineers They tend to claim it for themselves, and their coworkers tend to work the same way (informal comms). When I personally am concentrating on something, I just don’t respond to interruptions; it is easy to tell when someone is not interruptable. They don’t look up, they don’t respond or they are very cursory. This part is easy to handle socially. At Intel IT we have done another study of activity on the desktop using machine learning software. The statistics are far worse than those Nathan reports. But what is the real problem? Not just external interruptions, which do create a cognitive re-entry problem; our study measured it at a minute and a half, mechanically. The real problems are cascading problems concerning not just the social information environment, but the overhead of multi-tasking and how the desktop display structure is not set up to handle it. Each person has multiple teams, each team has multiple task obligations, and guess what? Each task requires multiple applications! It is context retention on the desktop that is the real recovery problem. TaskTracer, the machine learning software, tries to learn how to retain context for you. Task-based object linking, such as we have in our Miramar 3D desktop prototype, also retains context for you. Nathan, I know how you feel about this theme, but you are like the king who commanded the ocean to go back. How you deal with the stuff is the real question. PS was this a distraction?

Jan 10  |  Nathan Zeldes said:

Hey, the king may have failed, but the Dutch did a credible job at making the sea retreat to suit their needs…

That said, the truth no doubt is somewhere in the middle - there are good distractions and bad ones, plenty of either kind. It would be a better workplace if the bad ones were reduced…

Jan 11  |  Eleanor Wynn said:

Nathan, you do a great job of generating discussion! Yes, the Dutch have kept back the sea, for a while…see “An Inconvenient Truth”—no dikefront property for me! But, I do think that we are converging on similar solutions from our distinct perspectives—it is in the machine learning area that we can look for some mediation of social interaction so that everything does not have to be an interruption, but there are qualified interruptions. We anthropologists, as I have said many times, don’t do “behavior change”, but obviously we are in a situation where we need both broader social networking and better filtering for relevance. And, people do change their own behavior slowly. When my key contacts either don’t appear on chat or have “do not disturb” turned on, I tend to reflect on my own behavior. “Have I been a pest?” Probably. Then (“breakdowns cause reflection” there is a self-assessment of what is and is not worth bothering people for.

Jan 13  |  Armin said:

Who invented all these pop-ups, noises, flashing envelopes and whatever else for incoming e-mails anyway? And why are they all turned on by default (at least for Outlook)? And why are the options to turn them all off hidden in approx 5 different places (for Outlook at least)?

They are always the first options I turn off before I finish the rest of the setup of a new computer. Just so that I can get that done without being interrupted by constant popups, bleeps, blinking envelopes etc pp.

Jan 26  |  Barry McAdam said:

I found the comment by Elanor above very interesting “it is easy to tell when someone is not interruptable. They don’t look up, they don’t respond or they are very cursory.” It reminded me of a conversation I was having the other day about people using mobile phones whilst driving. The person calling the driver does not see the movement of the car like a fellow passenger would. This means that they do not know to react to the journey experience. Such a reaction could be pausing the conversation as the car approaches a busy junction like a passenger could. This happens without the driver having to make the effor to signal to the passenger they don’t want to be disturbed. It could be good to imagine a situation where someone about to send a mail or call someone could have a means to ‘notice’ the person is busy without the person having to signal it.
If we used keyboard activity as a measure of activity and possibly concentration for example, a busy keyboard could pop up a do not disturb dialog box to a possible distractor (someone who has the person in their send: field). I like the idea of this being a big grumpy uninterruptable face or an image of a brain not attempting to jump back a forth across the screen stumbling as it cannot do this efficiently.

Jan 27  |  Nathan Zeldes said:

Well said, Barry! One example of such a system for assessing one’s interruptibility and acting on it to prevent high-cost interruptions is BusyBody, a system developed by Microsoft Research - see http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/busybody_cscw.htm

Jan 30  |  Zura said:

Very interesting post and comments. My reaction to the research report was to compare the idea of computer interruptions with the interruptions one can experience by their own distractions, i.e., a person with an attention deficit disorder. If interruptions lower the IQ, then are distractible people all losing their intelligence?

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