Thursday morning the Wall Street journal ran a review of a book by freelance writer Maggie Jackson called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. As described by reviewer David Robinson, the book is “a searching look at . . . the distractions that technology has helped to bring about.” The book bounces “from anthropology and neuroscience to fast food and the rites of meditating monks,” basically covering the whole gamut of attention and distraction.
I haven’t read the book, but what struck me was a line from the review that the WSJ pulled out in a text box: “From email to instant messaging the interval between interruptions appears to be approaching zero.” Of course, conventional wisdom says Robinson right, that this is an age filled with more distraction than ever. And when it comes to our personal lives, he probably is right, but when it comes to the working world the picture is more muddled.
What some studies are finding is that the very tools we usually think of as culprits of distraction may actually be helping us to manage interruptions better. That is to say, if we assume that interruption in the work place is inevitable (as long as you’re not in one man business), then interruption by email and instant messenger may be better than any other form.
One such study, published last year in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, found that workers who use IM clients were more likely to finish tasks without being interrupted. While seemingly counter intuitive, the studies authors put forth the notion that IM was an easier interruption to manage than traditional communication methods. Workers could ignore the IM until they were ready to deal with it, unlike a phone call or a face-to-face encounter. And because the IM channel was in place, their colleagues were less likely to use these more traditional communication channels.(For more see the Ars Technica article giving a rundown of the study)
Of course email would seem to fit into the same category as IM here, but I think there are a few key differences. The first is that with most IM clients, the IM window is a small pop-up. It doesn’t take up much screen real-estate, and navigating to it and replying is a matter of a few clicks. Compare this to email where you have to open a full screen program, click to open the message, click to open a reply, and click to send the reply. The additional effort may not seem like a lot, but it’s enough to disrupt anyone’s mental flow.
Of course this doesn’t mean things are all good for instant messaging. The flip side of IM is that it’s easier for someone to initiate a distraction. Some organizations have rolled out IM only to find that some workers abuse the channel, ignoring the official channels for dealing with certain HR and support issues, and thus bogging down those departments. The good news is that this sort of abuse can usually be dealt with through training and the development of an internal IM etiquette policy.
The thing to keep in mind with any communications technology is that interruption is inevitable. The question is not “Will this new technology create another avenue for distraction?” It’s “Will this give workers more control of when they talk and how?”
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