According to research undertaken by Gloria Mark, Ph.D., associate professor at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, people can expect to be interrupted about once every three minutes. Reference—Dabbish, L., Mark, G., and Gonzalez, V. (2011). Why Do I Keep Interrupting Myself?: Environment, Habit and Self-Interruption. Proceeding of the twenty-ninth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI 2011). ACM Press, Vancouver, B.C. To arrive at this figure Dr. Mark and her team shadowed 36 managers, financial analysts, software developers, engineers, and project leaders for three days. They followed their subjects around during a working day and timed every event.
This study found that the average amount of time people spent on any single event before being interrupted or before switching tasks was about three minutes. This figure does not include time spent in formal meetings as it was assumed that people have limited control over their own productivity in this environment. This study defined ‘an event’ as the amount of time that people spent in continuous, uninterrupted use of a device or a document, or in an interaction with another person. Another area that this study investigated was how often people switched the focus of their work between unrelated tasks. The researchers chose the term ‘working sphere’ to describe an area of work where there was a common goal, a certain group of people, or other resources involved as well as its own timeframe or deadline.
This suggests that either people are not particularly good at concentrating on one area of work for extended periods, or that procrastination may be a problem and people may be seeking respite from work that they find demanding. If these periods without interruption seem unbelievably short, then you should spend some time surreptitiously watching how often people check their iPhone or BlackBerry for incoming emails and text messages. Even when people don’t pick up a separate device, they are usually working on a computer with Web access where the temptation of Facebook, email, news pages, and other Internet distractions are only a mouse click away.
Please Click Here For Download Ebook
0 comments :