A good portion of the work that I do requires thought. Whether I'm diagraming a system or writing code I'll be spending time on making decisions on what design pattern to use, the impact that code changes will have on other systems, or decomposing a problem into smaller steps. Maximum productivity is achieved when I get a chance to concentrate on a task for length of time uninterrupted. But it is difficult to work without interruptions. Between the instant messaging clients (plural), e-mail, telephones (also plural), and other devices of modern day it is almost impossible to work a long period of time without interruption.
I came across a paper on the web all about productivity and interruptions. The paper is "The Cost of Not Paying Attention: How Interruptions Impact Knowledge Worker Productivity," Jonathan B. Spira and Joshua B. Feintuch, Basex, 2005. I found the paper to have high applicability to the interruptions I experience in a day. The rest of this post is summary information taken directly from this paper. For now I'll talk about the negative parts of interruptions.
Interruptions in the work place are nothing new. But 20 years ago there were less ways to interrupt some one and more ways to block out interruptions. One could choose not to answer a phone and close the door to block interruptions. In the modern day it isn't quite so wasy. The aim of several technologies is to facilitate more means of communication. In theory this sounds great, but in practive it can overload the knowledge worker. Further complicating the problem is the fact that 40% of knowledge workers are in non-traditional work environments. Instead of working in the office they work in their home, hotel, and customer sites. There are more sources for interruptions in these environments (ex: television or others living in the same house).
Knowledge workers tend to work in collaborative environments. Collaborative environments can produce many more interruptions than what would be generated. Once an interruption is gone the worker's level of productivity will not immeidatly recover. This is especially significant to the work that allows himselt to be interrupted by the numerous interruption sources Some workers believe that they can compensate for time lost to interruptions by doing extra work outside of hours. But since work with interruptions is of lower productivity than work without interruptions working the extra hours may not fully compensate for the lost of productivity.
As mentioned today's workplace is collaboritive. Some interruptions can contribute towards higher productivity among a group. Next time I'll talk about how to seperate the negative interruptions from the positive ones.
Tags: