Twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds. According to one study, that’s how long it takes, on average, to regain our concentration after an interruption at work.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about thinking – and focus. So I was intrigued when I came across a study by Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California at Irvine. According to Professor Mark, it takes more than twenty-three minutes for a worker to return to a task after an interruption.
As we all know, these days we are constantly bombarded by interruptions at work – someone stopping by with a question, a phone call, or the ubiquitous ping of an email. What are the implications of all of those interruptions if it truly takes us so long to return to what we were doing in the first place?
Clearly our productivity level declines and it flat out takes us more time to complete our tasks. Back in college, Professor Milton Cummings taught me to estimate the amount of time it would take me to accomplish something – and then double it. Over the years, I found that Professor Cummings was probably off by a factor of at least two, though in fairness he didn’t have to deal with email back then.
Ironically, just as I finished typing the previous paragraph, my email pinged. It was an advertisement, nothing that required a response. But then I glanced out the window and noticed the sun had come out unexpectedly; so I checked the weather forecast on my phone. Then I noticed a yellow sticky note on my desk with a reminder and shot off a quick email to someone about an appointment. All told, it took about eighteen minutes before I was able to formulate this paragraph.
Feeling a little guilty about succumbing to distractions (especially when writing about that subject), I remembered that Professor Mark had addressed this issue, too. She found that many of our interruptions are what she styled as “self-interruptions.” In fact, Professor Mark’s research found that nearly half of our interruptions are self-created – and aren’t always bad. The the fact that the weatherman was wrong this morning was both unsurprising and unimportant, but I did manage to follow up on my appointment for tomorrow. It wasn’t wasted time – it was multi-tasking.
But do all those disruptions – the multi-tasking – just cause the interval between the start and finish of a task to be extended? Or do they impact general efficiency and, more importantly, the quality of what is produced?
Most likely it is the latter. Author Catherine Blythe reports that doing two tasks in parallel actually requires as much as 30% more time than doing them sequentially; and results in twice as many mistakes.
The implications for the workplace should be clear. All of those postings on Indeed that list the ability to multi-task as a job requirement are simply misdirected. Companies shouldn’t be searching for workers who can do many things at once. Instead, businesses should be considering how to organize around principles that reduce disruptions. And managers should be focused on creating a culture and environment that eliminates the expectation of an immediate response to all but the most critical matters.
