Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

Every morning you go to office with full of energy and ready to check off your to-do list – but all you get throughout the day is endless stream of interruptions. As soon as you start working on one task, your friend or colleague emails you; when you are replying to that email, someone pings you in your instant messenger (especially the browser based IMs like Gtalk), and the moment you finish these tasks and are getting back to your main work, your cell-phone rings. At the end of the day, you will observe that you have got constantly distracted with other things and have accomplished only a fraction of what you decided to do.

This article covers lot of interesting statistical analysis on how human-computer interaction happens and what are the future innovations in computer systems to make life less interruptive and more productive. As this article is too long, I am highlighting very important points here.

“Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task.”

Yes, you may argue that distractions are not just a plague on our work – sometimes they are our work. So it might be acceptable if you reply to such work related emails or messages. But most of the times you are getting interrupted by your friends or non-office related colleagues. Emailing and chatting with friends make you feel alive. It’s what makes you feel important. You just want to connect, connect, and connect. But what happens when you take that to the extreme? You get overconnected. We have to decide when, how fast and how many times we should get connected to external world.

“How fast are you supposed to reply to an e-mail message? Or an instant message? Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it – at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself.”

Consider this observation as well –

“Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to literally forget what task they were originally pursuing. Researchers find that 40 percent of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. The central danger of interruptions is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc we wreak with our short-term memory: What the heck was I just doing?”

This article also states that what research activities Microsoft is conducting to make these interruptions less interruptive and making users’ life more productive.

“Instead of pinging us with e-mail and instant messages the second they arrive, our machines could store them up – to be delivered only at an optimum moment, when our brains are mostly relaxed. With artificial intelligence, computer designers could re-engineer our e-mail programs, our messaging and even our phones so that each tool would work like a personal butler – tiptoeing around us when things are hectic and barging in only when our crises have passed. Horvitz’s (a researcher at Microsoft) early prototypes offer an impressive glimpse of what’s possible. An e-mail program he produced seven years ago, code-named Priorities, analyzes the content of your incoming e-mail messages and ranks them based on the urgency of the message and your relationship with the sender, then weighs that against how busy you are. Superurgent mail is delivered right away; everything else waits in a queue until you’re no longer busy.”

Wow! Microsoft is really doing some solid stuff in making human-computer interaction more productive and easier.

Now you must have realized that how less time we spend on our actual office work and how more time we spend on personal work. Now days, I follow this methodology very strictly – close your browser during actual office hours and check emails only in the morning, during lunch break, during afternoon coffee break and at the end of the day. At least it is working effectively with me. See if it works with you as well.