If you feel like you can’t string together 30 interrupted minutes of work thanks to e-mail, your BlackBerry or cell phone, you’re not alone. It turns out no one gets any work done at work these days, thanks to technology. But, ironically, that technology is necessary for people to complete the work they do get done.
The New York Times Magazine has an interesting feature on a study from UC Irvine “human-computer interactions” scientist Gloria Mark. Mark and grad students last year studied cube citizens at two West Coast high-tech firms to see how frequently they were interrupted by technology and how that affected their work.
The result: “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. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.”
Very interesting read and suggestions are here.
Via Waxy
