Where the bloody hell are you?
By Dr. Tom Buckley
Sound familiar? Do you find it impossible to take time out in your office to concentrate on finishing a task, or even have a quick ‘nothing break”, only to be constantly interrupted by the phone ringing, email alerts not to mention your colleagues’ needs? And that’s before we factor in family or friends’ interruptions as well as much needed personal breaks.
Do you find that you are often disturbed twice or three times in your day in order for someone to ensure you go their message? Well you’re not alone and recent research suggests that for workers, getting more than there minute’s sustained work without interruptions has become mission impossible in our technologically driven work environments.
Researchers at the University of California shadowed a dozen information workers for three days and found that in their office areas they were interrupted on average every three minutes by phone calls, text messages or people popping in to see what’s wrong when they didn’t answer emails or phone messages instantly. Such interruptions take up over two hours of the working day and only 77% of interrupted work is resumed the same day. 77%!
Other research from the Institute of Psychiatry in London that reported being bombarded by emails and phone calls has a greater detrimental effect on IQ to smoking marijuana. You can only abuse the brain for so long eh!
Rosalind Pickard from MIT Boston suggests some really useful tips for surfing the wave of interruptions. These are my favourites:
1. Get a bigger monitor – apparently helps people work up to 44% faster – works – I’ve done it
2. Put up a “do not disturb” sign and enforce it
3. Rearrange your office furniture so that you desk faces away from the flow of people – bad karma I hear you say but your there to get the job done
4. Stand up to talk to people who interrupt you - so that they can see that they are doing – also good for you physical well being
5. Put a big clock in your office in view of visitors and keep an eye on it while you are talking – be careful with this one!
6. Be prepared for interruptions and factor it into your to-do list - perhaps make it known the good times for interruptions. I have colleague who puts a picture of a shark on her door when she does not want to be interrupted – I don’t walk in then so it works
7. Keep a note pad and write down what you are doing before you were interrupted – this definitely works for me
8. and finally…..cutting 2 centimeters off the front legs of a visitors chair makes it just enough to keep visitors visits short!
Tom Buckley a University lecturer and researcher in the field or Health Sciences whose doctoral studies focused on physiological responses to stress. Author of several peer reviewed publications and supporting author of Flip the Switch, his current research interests are in human factors related to performance and wellbeing