I’ve reported a number of cases where managers (most famously, Barack Obama) implement an interrupt-free environment by mandating a “no cellphones” policy in meetings. While I wholeheartedly applaud this behavior, I must in all fairness report a dissenting viewpoint.
I was talking to a Gen Y worker whose company had launched such a ban, and he told me that he thought it was not a good idea at all, because his millennial generation needed the cellphones to work, he said! To his mind, having a coworker without a cellphone in ringing mode meant they were inaccessible, and hence unavailable to help him get his job done.
This is interesting. It isn’t that the younger set are unaffected by interruptions and information overload; there is ample evidence that they are, and my bet is that they pay a price just like their elders. But unlike the Boomer and Gen X population, these younger folks weigh the pros and cons differently; to them, ubiquitous communication is a part of their lifestyle both on and off the job, and they feel at a loss without it.
Looking at the bigger picture, I’d say that the real goal should be to strike a better balance between communication and concentration that will benefit everybody, Gen Y and Boomers alike. We need a balance because we can’t simply disconnect them and let them work in their diverse methods. They may have different expectations, but they share the same work environment and the same message flow; they can’t each choose their preferred work style in isolation. Finding a work culture that works for everybody, and that drives nobody nuts, will be a worthy challenge for the coming years.
I’ve written before about various methods of ensuring freedom from interruption in the office; but pre-dating these there was the familiar “Do not Disturb” sign you hang on a hotel room door knob. These used to come in different colors, but they kept pretty much to the same form dictated by their function. A cardboard rectangle with hole… what was there to improve?
Well, on my recent trip to Berlin I saw what someone felt is the next great leap in interruption-busters. The NH Hotel we stayed in had a switch inside the room that would light an electric sign outside it. No more messing with cardboard.
This looks like an improvement… except for one minor detail: it would be all too easy to forget the sign ON when you leave the room, thereby preventing the staff from making your room up in your absence. The old system did not share this drawback – when you shut the door the dangling sign would be sure to catch you eye.
Seems to me that this idea could be made to work better if opening the door would switch the sign off automatically… But then, I am not a Hotel Systems consultant, am I?
A lecture attendee reacted to my data about the scary extent of disruption caused by endlessly ringing cellphones by saying: “I keep my cellphone turned on only in case my child calls – I wish it would only ring for him!”
Now, here is a feature that is painfully needed, and obviously useful: Allow the user to specify which callers the phone will ring for, and which it will not, when you put it into a “Silent” mode. Or use “vibrate” as part of the equation: Ring for calls from an emergency-prone dependent, vibrate for close family and coworkers, let all others leave a message.
How about it, developers?
A manager at a small company told me over coffee of a job interview she gave a young candidate, in the middle of which he received a cellphone call from his wife (who wanted, with the wrong timing, to wish him luck in the coming interview).
I was curious how this had affected her attitude to the candidate. After all, on one hand, it is nice that he’d answer his wife – he proved to be a considerate spouse. Yet on the other hand he had interrupted the interview and did not have the courtesy to either shut the phone down (or silence it) before the interview, or to ignore it once it rang. He was showing respect to his wife, and disrespect to his potential employer.
The manager told me she did not let the incident count against the young fellow, but she did think he was being immature. I think that for my part, I’d be less forgiving in this case – I’d interrupt a friendly conversation myself for a phone call I care about, but not a formal meeting like an interview. After all, there are two people involved – the one phoning you and the one talking to you; why give the interrupter priority over the one in your presence? Isn’t it rude? It’s the same attitude you meet at the bank, when the clerk serving you keeps devoting time to phone calls from other clients – ignoring the fact that you had patiently waited in line: why are the callers more important, you can’t help thinking?
And I think a key problem here is that we don’t really have good etiquette norms in place. Other areas of social interaction have evolved more slowly, and there are accepted Do’s and Don’ts covering them. Not so cellular telephony, where anything goes.
Maybe it’s time to take stock and create the missing rules of etiquette?
What do you think?
If you have any experience with hospitals (and who doesn’t, unfortunately?) you know of the “Doctors’ visit” ritual. Once or twice a day a procession of the attending doctors go from room to room in a ward, followed by nurses and a cart that once had all the patients’ paper files and these days may have a computer on it instead. It is a solemn affair, and the patients and their families hold their breaths as they await the experts’ verdict regarding the situation of this patient or that. Meanwhile other people are kept out of the ward – the physicians need to concentrate, and their visit is religiously shielded from all disturbance.
Or is it? I was at the World Usability Day conference recently, and after lecturing on Information Overload in corporate settings I was treated to a fascinating lecture by Prof. Yoel Donchin of the Hadassah Medical School, who has been studying the matter of interruptions and distractions during these medical visits. These were defined as anything that causes the doctor to focus attention on something other than the purpose of the visit. The research was done in detail and with careful statistical methodology. Care to guess how many times, on average, a group of visiting doctors are distracted during a two-hour visit?
Did you guess 80? Yep… the exact figure is 83 distractions per visit. Some of these are bearable perhaps, like noisy activities in the background or nurses talking among themselves, but there were nine distractions per visit that forced a full suspension of the execution of the visit for a while, like phone calls and unrelated conversations involving the visiting doctors.
Obviously, the ability of the medics to focus on the matter at hand – the patients and their illnesses – must suffer a good deal with all this interrupting going on at a rate of once every 1.5 minutes. In that respect things are no different than with other knowledge workers in other environments – and yet, in a hospital setting this is really worrying. It is at least encouraging that Hadassah is conducting this in-depth research to understand what is happening in detail – and, I understand from Dr. Donchin, to examine remedial changes in the procedures and organizational culture that make this reality possible.
I was lecturing at Ben Gurion University about Information Overload, and one attendee challenged me with this question: has the cost of disconnecting from the continuous barrage of communications been quantified?
What he meant was this: the accepted wisdom in the Info Overload community is that it is advisable to take time out, “Quiet Time”, pre-assigned time slots in the workday when you don’t pull in incoming messages and calls and try to secure some isolation from interruptions. This allows one to get a stretch of concentrated focused thinking, which can do wonders for creativity, quality and effectiveness. But, as this guy pointed out, it is possible that in doing so you will miss out on important communications, or be perceived as unresponsive and piss off your customers, or slow down the work of your team. Has anyone measured this downside of “Quiet Time”?
The short answer is, not to my knowledge. There have been a number of research reports about the cost of not having focus time (and the numbers can be horrific), but I know of no research into the flip side of this.
A longer answer is, while we don’t have numbers here, I believe that the cost of disconnection can’t be prohibitive because this cost is something we can control by defining intelligently how we take the quiet stretches. To be sure, you can overdo it: I knew one guy (a Fellow at a large corporation) who only read his email twice a week; that would be a bad idea for almost anyone – too little connectivity unless you’re a trappist monk. But if you handle it right, you can retain sufficient interactivity and still have some time to think; taking 2-3 quiet hours at a time will not be too disruptive for most jobs. You need to strike a balance.
To avoid annoying your customers, you can have the best of both worlds – quiet and communication – by building into your methodology a means to reach you based on urgency. I wrote about this in a previous post. But if you’re part of a larger team, as many of us are, it helps if you design the Quiet Time methodology in coordination with your team mates; this has been tried in various places with good results, for instance in the developer team documented in Prof. Perlow’s book “Finding Time“. And if you do it right, you can make the “cost of missed interruptions” as small as you like, while the benefit of being able to think remains fixed. That’s good enough by me…
Driving and <anything other than driving> don’t mix well, as I recently pointed out. Unfortunately, the number of <things other than driving> that you can do in a car grows fast as new technologies turn our cars into mobile electronic appliances with ever more computing, communications and multimedia capabilities. The more screens, computers, GPS systems and cellular communications on board, the less will the driver keep his or her eyes on the road!
It is encouraging, then, to read that Ford has responded to this issue and will introduce, in selected 2011 models, features specifically intended to prevent distraction. The new MyFord Touch system has a large “Do Not Disturb” button, which will block incoming phone calls and text-message alerts while the vehicle is moving. Incoming calls, we are told, will be diverted to your cell phone’s voicemail, but you can still make voice-activated outbound calls.
Furthermore, the system will lock out – disable – some features while the vehicle is in motion, even without driver command. These include pairing a Bluetooth phone, browsing the web, playing videos and editing photos. Anything that requires typing on the keypad is prohibited while the car is moving.
You don’t say! Drivers won’t be allowed to edit photos while driving?! How cruel!…
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!
People need some peace and quiet to be able to focus on creative work. Since in this age of the Blackberry interruptions are a constant disruption all day long, and endless meetings clobber one’s schedule, it follows that knowledge workers have two choices: either abandon all hope of doing seriously creative work, or try to find the required peace and quiet outside of the standard day. Some people do this late at night, although when you work at an international enterprise your evenings are likely to be spoken for due to intercontinental conference calls. Others go for the early morning.
The idea is simple: if your biological clock permits you to get up really early, you can come to the office at 6AM and have a couple of hours of peace to do your thinking work; I’ve known a number of managers who discovered this strategy. And it worked for them just fine – for a while. Then, their coworkers discovered that while these people were always busy during the formal work day, their calendar was nice and open from 6AM to 8AM – and they were awake and working! Once this secret came out, the poor early risers lost the advantage of quiet time and found their meeting-laden workday extended by an hour or two backwards, to their detriment and frustration…
You can run, but you can never hide, it seems – unless you’re lucky enough to work for an organization that has the vision to address information overload and implement strict expectations that balance accessibility and the need for thinking time.
People need some peace and quiet to be able to focus on creative work. Since in this age of the Blackberry interruptions are a constant disruption all day long, and endless meetings clobber one’s schedule, it follows that knowledge workers have two choices: either abandon all hope of doing seriously creative work, or try to find the required peace and quiet outside of the standard day. Some people do this late at night, although when you work at an international enterprise your evenings are likely to be spoken for due to intercontinental conference calls. Others go for the early morning.
The idea is simple: if your biological clock permits you to get up really early, you can come to the office at 6AM and have a couple of hours of peace to do your thinking work; I’ve known a number of managers who discovered this strategy. And it worked for them just fine – for a while. Then, their coworkers discovered that while these people were always busy during the formal work day, their calendar was nice and open from 6AM to 8AM – and they were awake and working! Once this secret came out, the poor early risers lost the advantage of quiet time and found their meeting-laden workday extended by an hour or two backwards, to their detriment and frustration…
You can run, but you can never hide, it seems – unless you’re lucky enough to work for an organization that has the vision to address information overload and implement strict expectations that balance accessibility and the need for thinking time.
Telemarketers are one of the annoyances we all live with, and contribute their part to the overall flow of interruptions that it damaging our ability to concentrate on what we want to do. I find it interesting that these days, at any rate here in Israel, these rascals are following in the footsteps of our work-related information overload into the evening hours.
Today I got two calls in my evening – one from a car rental company stating its desire to improve its service to me (actually, they simply wanted to verify my contact information) and one from a health provider whom I cut short before learning what they wanted. The first came at 7:12 PM; the second well after 8:00 PM. Someone was paying the poor agents doing these calls to work an after-work-hours shift so they could annoy me in my own after-hours time.
Many of us are used to take this kind of intrusion from our peers at work, unfortunately; but for our service providers to send total strangers to obliterate our private time really takes nerve. And why are they doing this? Obviously, because they figure that’s when they can find us at home, at our listed numbers that they dredge up from the white pages. It makes perfect sense – once society accepts that there is no such thing as a sacrosanct personal time. As our society, the world over, has done… 
