About every three minutes, you are interrupted at work. Text message chimes, new email alerts, social media updates and distractions from co-workers elicit a knee-jerk response that takes you away from productivity, and more importantly, away from deep-level, strategic thinking. It goes without saying that these ubiquitous distractions make mistakes more likely to happen.
“Many adults perceive they can work well when they are multitasking, but when you study their performance, they have a high rate of errors. It’s more difficult than they think it is,” Phillip Brantley, education division director for Pennington Biomedical Research Center, tells Business Report in a feature from the current issue.
In a study conducted at an information technology company, Gloria Mark, a professor at UC Irvine’s Department of Informatics, collected data on a variety of employees’ workflow throughout the day. The results showed that employees who were constantly interrupted worked faster in anticipation of the next interruption. However, their speed came at the cost of more stress, frustration and effort.
Study participants identified email as the biggest source of their daily interruptions.
Andrew Schwarz, an associate professor at LSU’s Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences, says he used to be the type that answered email instantly.
“If it was a group email, I wanted to be the first to respond,” he says. “[But] I saw as I was getting more and more connected, I was becoming less and less productive.”
Schwarz read about the work habits of successful individuals and began to implement new strategies into the way he works. One approach is to “go dark” twice a week for a set period of time when he is working on his research or writing.
“You have to be very deliberate how you structure your workday and how to handle all that is handed to you,” he says. Read the full story. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
