As I'm balancing a gazillion things that need to get done in the final days before Sales SheBang 2008, this excellent article by Dan Markovitz, president of TimeBack Management struck me as particularly appropriate.
Cogitus Interruptus: The Case for Focus
Cogitus Interruptus is the disease of the modern workplace. Its symptoms are familiar to any executive: the inability to complete a thought or a task without losing focus under the onslaught of relentless interruptions.
It results in a lack of efficiency, a loss of time to solve problems, to think strategically, to plan, to dream – to get your company from here to there. But there’s hope: there are techniques to help you regain the opportunity to think without interruption.
It’s no surprise that our ability to focus on a single task without interruption is waning. What is a surprise is the extent to which interruptions define our workdays. In a survey of 1000 senior executives, technology research firm Basex found that knowledge workers lose about two hours per day due to unnecessary interruptions such as instant messaging, spam e-mail, telephone calls and the Web.
Of course, some of the damage is self-inflicted: more than 60% of the respondents read email immediately or nearly immediately.
Gloria Mark, a researcher at UC Irvine, found a similar situation. Each employee she studied spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted. Moreover, it would take 25 minutes on average to return to that task.
To some extent, an increase in interruptions is an inevitable result of today’s larger, more complex organizations. Managing sprawling enterprises requires more team interactions, and dotted line relationships in matrix structures abound. The pervasiveness, ease, and zero cost of email, IM, and SMS has exacerbated the situation by encouraging communication, even when it’s not valuable.
But in fact, there is a real cost to this communication; it’s just not borne by the sender. It’s borne by the recipient. Mary Czerwinski, at Microsoft Research Labs, found that 40% of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. As the New York Times put it,
The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: "What the heck was I just doing?"
But even when people remember what they’re supposed to do, they’re less efficient in completing those tasks. David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan, says,
Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes. Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.
And René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University points out that for all of the hundred billion neurons in the brain, “a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once.”
The University of Michigan and the FAA found that people who switch between different types of tasks – say, email and spreadsheets, or drafting a contract and talking to a colleague – lose 20-40% of their efficiency.
Just as there’s changeover time for machines on a production line, the human brain loses time in changing over from one type of task to another. Peter Drucker saw this forty years ago: in The Effective Executive, he wrote,
To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.
Hey, New York City! I'm coming to town!
