Recently I was talking to a senior manager about the role of BlackBerry alerts in information overload. The guy was quite aware of the impact, and told me he had turned off all incoming-email alerts on his device. Smart move!
Then he added that this move had limited effect because he was in the habit of checking the BlackBerry for new email every few minutes anyway.
This is a prime example of self-induced interruptions. People in this day and age are so addicted to the flow of messaging that even absent external interrupts they simply interrupt themselves. This was borne out by the research of Prof. Gloria Mark of UC Irvine: her observations of knowledge workers in their daily routine not only showed that they drop what they’re doing and switch to something else every 3 minutes on average; they also showed that half these interruptions are self-induced. It’s as if when a person has six minutes of uninterrupted time to focus their thinking and excel at their work, well, after three minutes they go “Oh my, I’ve been at this three minutes… maybe I should check my email, or Facebook, or just switch task for the heck of it?”
Of course some level of interruption in whatever we do is vital for our mental well-being, not to mention our lower back; before email people would still take breaks to go to the water cooler, after all. But they didn’t go to the water cooler ten times an hour, did they?
This situation may be linked to the hectic pace of life we all experience: perhaps people simply don’t have the attention span required to focus on any task for more than a few minutes at a stretch. If this is true, then we have a problem – there is more than enough data to prove that interruptions reduce creativity, productivity and peace of mind. And while fighting the external interruptions is relatively easy (if you get managerial support, at any rate) – you can turn off the alerts, or institute workplace agreements that safeguard some “quiet time” – I suspect that eliminating this internal drive to interrupt one’s own work will be much harder. And well worth the effort!
There are some analogies to email: I was communicating across the globe; I made contact with many people I’d never met before; and, let’s face it, much of what we said (or pounded out in Morse code) was not very interesting per se: weather conditions, equipment and antenna configurations mostly – about as fascinating as much incoming email. And yet it was fun – an adjective no one would ascribe to email.
